Is a VPN worth it or is using a free one a better choice? Or should you not use a VPN at all? It depends on what you seek and the service you use.
If you only use your device to check the news and don’t send any sensitive messages or don’t do things that you are not proud of on the internet, then you don’t. If you don’t need to watch something that’s not available in your country the chances are that you do not need a VPN either.
But if you are searching for whether a VPN service is worth it, chances are you aren’t a John Doe that is merely using the internet to check the news.
If you have something to hide on the internet regardless of what it is, a VPN is the most secure way to do that. PrivateVPN utilizes AES 256-bit encryption code with 2048-bit DH key. You most likely don’t know what that means so to put things into perspective, it will cost trillions of dollars to crack that kind of encryption.
If you have nothing to hide, you don’t need a VPN. But there’s not a lot of people that have nothing to hide. And hiding without using a VPN if connected to the internet is not an easy task. In fact, it’s almost impossible to hide something without the use of a VPN.
And then there’s the whole “I want to watch BBC iPlayer outside of the UK and American Netflix outside of the US” kind of issue that people have. If you are in a country where you can’t access the content you want to access simply because you are in a bad location, that’s where a VPN becomes extremely worth it.
But not all VPN services are created equally so not all will provide you with protection and the ability to access content.
At the end of the day, every company needs to make money.
Even if a company was to be nice, there’s a lot of costs involved in getting a VPN service up and running. There’s only so much a company can do.
And if the service is free, of course, it will attract more people. The more people that use a server, the slower it works. Now, with paid services, this does not tend to be a problem as there’s a bigger investment on both servers and internet capacity. At PrivateVPN we purchase our internet capacity directly from the IP transit provider for instance instead of from a hosting company like free and a lot of even paid services do. Of course, we get some of our internet capacity from hosting companies too but getting it directly from an IP transit provider allows us to latency and provide higher speeds.
Free VPN services might be free, but they are also superbly slow. And the servers don’t tend to be in many locations either. At PrivateVPN we aim to provide servers in as many countries as possible to allow you to access content that might not be possible to access outside of a certain country. We offer 56 different server locations so whether you want to access content in Poland or Vietnam, you can. Meanwhile, free services tend to provide only American servers.
A purpose of a business is to make money. Unless you are a non-profit, you need to make money. So what do most free VPN services do?. They give away your data. Something that a VPN service is not meant to do. So yeah, if you are wondering if a VPN worth it, a free VPN service is most likely is not.
Sometimes a company won’t sell your data. Sometimes it will simply use that data for their own gain. Facebook is an excellent example of this with Onavo Protect. It’s a free VPN service in theory but it collects your data, and it’s used by Facebook to “gain insights into the products and services people value.”
Is a VPN worth it if it’s free? Probably not. There’s always a catch. And you can’t allow for catches when security is involved.
If a VPN service can provide you with a service that provides proper encryption and has no logs, as that also matters if you want to full encryption, then a VPN is worth it. Of course, many server locations matter too as otherwise you will be stuck in terms of what content you can access.
And that’s what we aim to provide at PrivateVPN. Any company can say that they don’t store don’t store any information relating to your activities but even if we wanted to, we are a Swedish company and Sweden’s privacy laws don’t allow us to do anything like that even if we wanted to, which we don’t.
If you’d like to check us out, you can get a full refund for 30 days if you're not satisfied with our service after you sign up with our easy 3-step registration after you press the Buy button at the top-right of the screen.
Written by Michael Smolski.