Do you need a personal VPN service? If you Google around so as to a lot of people use VPN services to bypass the web restrictions from their countries, like in the centre East or China. But a VPN can do so much more for you personally.
The VPN works by encrypting all your Internet traffic and redirecting it via a VPN server, typically located in the USA. This can have two immediate effects:
1. Your Internet traffic will be obscured from anyone “listening” on the line. Even your ISP or company will have no idea in regards to what your actual Internet traffic really is.
2. Your real IP address will undoubtedly be hidden from the sites you visit, thus offering you anonymity while online.
So even if you are in Wireless HotSpots, places that hackers often scout to find new victims, you will be protected with all the VPN. Firesheep, the Firefox plugin is really a preferred tool of the trade and is incredibly simple to use, even by amateur hackers, or “script-kiddies” as they are called in the underground community. The VPN encryption may also keep you safe from the Firesheep attacks.
The bad part is that everything comes at a cost. Two main issues to be discussed here:
1. When using the VPN you’ll experience a decrease in speed. This is caused by the encryption and the traffic routing. So if you are in France and you are employing a VPN server, your traffic will get encrypted, sent from France to the VPN server in USA and from the VPN USA server redirected to it`s original intended destination. From there the traffic flows via exactly the same route all the way back to you in France… That`s a long trip right?
2. yoursite.com are paid. There are several free ones, but folks have had bad reviews in the past about free VPN service: limits on bandwidth, poor speeds and connection drops some users say. The paid services generally do much better in terms of performance. Expect to pay from 10$ – 20$ monthly for an excellent VPN service.
Another important aspect may be the encryption the VPN uses. Currently SSL VPNs are considered to have the safest encryption. The most used SSL VPN protocols are SSTP and OpenVPN. Unlike other protocols they use certificates through the authentication process, making a man-in-the-middle hacker attack almost impossible.
So, my advice will be, if you care about your privacy and security, get yourself a VPN service and always use it in networks you consider unsecured (like airport or coffee shops public networks).