Recommended VPN service?

SquirrelTakos · 04 Nov 2010

I have been thinking about getting a VPN service for many reasons, and the only thing stopping me is deciding which service to choose. I want all my traffic encrypted for my privacy at home, and I want to be able to safely use the unencrypted internet at my university on my laptop and iphone without worrying about any of my packets being sniffed out.

I'd like to subscribe to a service at a reasonable price, over using a free, unreliable service. I've been using Hamachi for years for remote access, but I it's not going to cover everything else I need to do.

Also, are VPNs reliable when playing online games? Do they add a ton of latency?

Thank you for your time.

DeaconFrost · 04 Nov 2010

What is it you are trying to do, exactly? Are you trying to access a home computer while away from home? If so, I'm not sure where gaming comes in. Hamachi is a free VPN app many use to play LAN games together remotely. If you are just trying to access a home computer while away, LogMeIn works great, and is free.

SquirrelTakos · 04 Nov 2010

DeaconFrost said:

What is it you are trying to do, exactly? Are you trying to access a home computer while away from home? If so, I'm not sure where gaming comes in. Hamachi is a free VPN app many use to play LAN games together remotely. If you are just trying to access a home computer while away, LogMeIn works great, and is free.

I've been using Hamachi for a long time, and it's great for remote access. But I want to use a VPN service to encrypt all of my traffic in and out of my router/computer.

DeaconFrost · 04 Nov 2010

You don't use a VPN just to encrypt traffic. A VPN is just what the letters imply...a virtual private network...meaning you need an endpoint to connect to, so you can access private resources while on a public network. Encryption also relies on the endpoint you are connecting to...which for general usage...isn't possible because you'll have many endpoints...such as each website you visit.

Unless you have a reason for the NSA or CIA to be targeting you, you don't need to worry about encrypting all of your data. Just make sure you are using a firewall, and you're fine.

mckillwashere · 04 Nov 2010

The op appears to be inquiring about this so while he is using a public wifi AP they can use that and not have to worry about packt sniffing.

SquirrelTakos · 05 Nov 2010

Yes, I primarily want it since I am on unsecured networks so often.

Is there a way to use hamachi on my laptop on the unsecured network, while using my home ip as the endpoint? Basically just using my house as the proxy? I know my phone has the ability to use vpn also, so I'm not sure if hamachi would be a possibility, but I would like that secure also.

I have some knowledge in networking, but not so much in VPN and security.

mckillwashere · 05 Nov 2010

Since your reasoning seems legit and I don't blame you... I have a personal server that redirects all of my traffic from any computer i use remotely through. I just log into my win server 2008 r2 vpn connection and everything is nice and secure via policy...

Windows 7 has a feature like this as well...
Virtual Private Network (VPN) - Enable Incoming VPN Connections
you can use a site like afraid.org or dyndns (there are several good ones) to redirect your trafic back to your machine and when you ip changes it redirects your web address to that new IP. Its very handy and easy to set up :)

SquirrelTakos · 05 Nov 2010

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction, I'll have to give that a try. I wasn't aware that you could do this in 7.

mckillwashere · 05 Nov 2010

I included a link in my previous post :)

Hower · 06 Sep 2011

I like VPN service https://kebrum.com/ it uses PPTP, L2TP& OpenVPN protocols, costs not so much, if I'm not mistaken they have free service, but I don't use it. Good defendence of network