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Monday, January 25th
Private Internet Access is a U.S.-based VPN service that provides a secure tunnel through which you can browse the Internet. It has instant activation and unmetered VPN transfer at the lowest price of all services we've reviewed. We love the low price but wish they had a longer money-back guarantee period.
IP Vanish VPN provides high speed, secure Internet connections across over 40,000 IPs, over 1,000 servers, and in over 60 countries. You can use this service to access any website, in any location, without fear of hackers stealing your sensitive information or governments and organizations spying on you. IP Vanish gets low marks because of its overwhelmingly bad Better Business Bureau ratings and customer feedback.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It does just what it says. It creates a virtual (as opposed to physical) private network for you by encrypting (or scrambling) each and every piece of data that goes from your computer out onto the Internet as well as any data that comes back to you from the Internet.
So, who needs a VPN? If you're concerned about the rising problem of "hackers" - people who infiltrate computers and networks to steal or misuse information - you should be looking at a VPN service. Or, if you think your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may log, monitor, or analyze what you do online, a VPN is for you.
Millions of credit cards can be exposed online at any given moment as people purchase things from popular ecommerce sites. If the ecommerce site you're buying from doesn't bother to encrypt that information, a hacker can "sniff" that information right out of your connection with the website. Anything you type into a vendor's website form becomes fair game for identity fraudsters and thieves.
Furthermore, ISPs have been known to sell their user's information to marketers and advertisers. Or, they can use it to restrict (throttle) your bandwidth and block access to sites they don't want you to see.
Finally, a VPN is useful for people who live in countries where governments regularly censor information not flattering to the state, or that they deem to be harmful to their citizens. Protests, rallies, and citizen actions that get started online usually don't have a chance of being successful without some type of VPN service protecting the organizers from being spied on.
To choose a VPN service, you need to research their features and compare their costs, reputations, security, performance, and customer service. Some of the factors to use when researching VPN services include:
TopConsumerReviews.com has reviewed and ranked the best VPN Services available today. We hope these reviews will help you find the right VPN service to make browsing the Web 100% secure!
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