Hey guys, To keep it short, I recently toyed with the idea of setting up a persistent VPN to the outside world, maybe through a provider such as BTGuard, IPVanish or similar. Questions that occurred to me were: Anyone used anything similar? Is it worth it, or just over-paranoia? I don't torrent much Does it affect online gaming? Does it have to be set up on each device on your network, or does it "happen" between the router and the WAN, in which case, how do you set it up? Thanks in advance!
Yes it will effect gaming but depending on the VPN provider and where they are connecting you too it could make your ping lower or higher (most likely higher) No I've not done anything like this yet but might do in the future. You can do it on each invididual device or if you are happy to buy a router which can support WAN IPSEC tunnels then all deviced that are connecting through this will have traffic sent over the VPN.
Micro Mart mag recently reviewed a few anonymity programs and gave the editors choice to Cyberghost 5 (the page takes a while to load or did for me) there is even an Snowden edition
I use privateinternetaccess. It seems like a good service and was less expensive than most of the other choices and is highly regarded. For the most part it does not seem to slow down traffic at all. Though I generally turn it on and off as I want to use it... I haven't left it for gaming yet. If you don't care to be tracked and monitored then no, you are not being paranoid just exercising your right to reduce the ability of corporations/government collecting data on you to be used in ways you may not agree with. As far as number of devices most VPN services limit to one device connected per account. If you want to have multiple devices connected at once it makes more sense to get a capable router and run the VPN connection there than pay for more expensive multi device access if it is even offered. As far as setting it up to use goes, it depends on the model... getting a DDWRT capable model would be easiest as there are instructions for those on most. For PC it also depends. Many of them offer a client program that you can use that is simple, or you can use openvpn or the inbuilt vpn setup in the OS. Even still I do use a number of other things and best practices to help reduce my exposure as well.
Personally I'd only use a vpn for specific things. On a single machine for instance, connecting only when required. Vyper vpn for instance can give you lots of breakout points to access geographically restricted content. Then a persistent connection I would use only for routing site to site... which could in turn could permit me to be a bit more blasé with security such as using telnet instead of SSH, FTP instead of SFTP or mounting network drives. This would mean I would only route certain traffic over the VPN, otherwise I'm losing bandwidth to paranoia.
You don't have to loose bandwidth though... even when connected on VPN I can still top out my line rating on single download if the source is capable. For the most part I don't notice any difference other than some sites I can't connect to, or sometimes have hard time initial connect to swarm on bittorrent especially if it is very small. But that is most likely because 'host' is set up to block ip range of VPNs. So really I do the opposite, only turn it off for specific things that I can't otherwise access with VPN connection. Also, depending on your ISP you may also get a better connection as the tunnel beats their traffic shaping. Some I know can now actually watch 1080p streams from legit source smoothly after start using VPN.
Yeah, you don't lose much... but it is worth knowing there is a difference. So you need to look for a provider that is capable if using a service, else what was the point? If you have a site that you could use instead that has a faster connection than yourself, that is also an option. So I could route all traffic via a data centre and not notice any difference really for instance.
Well yes, exactly... most good VPN is hosted in some major datacenter... basically you need to make sure that 1. the VPN has good bandwidth preferably higher than what you have with your connection (this way your own connection is the bottleneck not the VPN connection and speeds will be as normal as if you were not using it), 2. that the VPN itself doesn't have any of their own lame traffic shaping, 3. that the VPN doesn't have per account bandwidth limits, 4. VPN doesn't store logs of user activity. That will eliminate quite a few of them, then you pick from what is left based on price, user review and etc.
