VPNS AND SMART DNS SERVICES
We rounds up the best subscription services to slip past site blocks.
This whole accessing Hulu, BBC and Netflix US thing sounds appealing, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, some of those streaming providers have started making moves against the tools that have historically been used to bypass their geoblocks, banning entire IP address ranges from accessing their services.
So finding a VPN or smart DNS provider that can give you access to the streaming videos you want has become something of a lottery, especially since many of the providers that have been blocked actively work to obfuscate that fact.
So this month we decided to take a look at some of the most popular smart DNS and VPN services and see how they stack up when it comes to geoblocking. For VPNs, we’ll also take a look at speeds and general security as well.
SMART DNS SERVICES
Smart DNS services offer the easiest way to unblock streaming sites on all your devices. A simple DNS server change is all that’s needed to set them up on any device, which makes them very appealing for people who are only interested in bypassing geoblocks and don’t care much about the security benefits of VPNs.
It should be noted that nearly all smart DNS services also offer VPNs, sometimes as part of the base cost and sometimes at additional cost. For this review, however, we wanted to focus on their smart DNS services and what they can deliver. We’ll get reviews of VPN services a little later.
VPN SERVICES
If you’d like a bit of extra security on top of your geoblock-foiling, and perhaps the option to download from BitTorrent anonymously, then a VPN is a better bet than a smart DNS service.
It does require more effort, however. Even those VPNs that have solutions to Netflix and Hulu’s blockade tend to make you work for them, having to contact support, trawl forums and play server hopscotch to get it all functioning — only to have things change up and having to start again. Still, online anonymity and link security is not something to be sniffed at, and you may find it’s worth the time.
HOW WE TESTED SPEED TESTS.
For VPN services, we ran tests using speedtest. net in both the US and UK. For the US, we connected to the primary US West or Los Angeles server within the VPN app. Then we performed the test against a server in Irvine, California. For the UK, we set the VPN location to London and tested it against a London server in speedtest. net.
The speed tests were designed to reveal just how much bandwidth the VPN services really provide, and an indication of whether they’re suitable for media streaming. You can compare the result to our baseline (no VPN) speeds of 29.93Mbps to the US and 16.62Mbps to the UK.
These results, it should be noted, are not universal for the VPN’s servers. VPNs typically run hundreds of servers, each likely getting different results depending on the load on that particular server, and if you get a slow server you can often try different ones to get better speeds. However, the speeds are useful as a broad indication of the kind of contention rates the VPN provider is happy to sustain.
STREAMING TESTS.
For both Smart DNS and VPN services, we also tried connecting to and watching video streams from three major international (and normally geoblocked) services: Netflix US, Hulu and Amazon (US).
Amazon isn’t aggressive about blocking VPNs and proxies, and worked in most instances. However, both Hulu and Netflix implement anti-proxy blacklists and are the true test of whether the provider can foil geoblocks.
In instances where Hulu or Netflix didn’t work immediately from a US West/Los Angeles location, we tried to connect to two other points of
“Finding a VPN or smart DNS provider that can give you access to the streaming videos you want has become something of a lottery, especially since many of the providers that have been blocked actively work to obfuscate that fact.”
presence if available. If we still couldn’t get it to work, we then searched the VPN provider forums (if available), then contacted the provider’s online support service (if available). If we still couldn’t fi nd a Netflix or Hulucapable server, the service failed.
(As an aside, we don’t think it’s reasonable to expect users to trawl Reddit and thirdparty forums for the magic server that still works; either the information is available from the provider itself, or it’s a failure).
It’s very important to note that these test results were true as of June 1 this year. However, the cat and mouse game between the VPN/Smart DNS providers and content providers is still under way, and by the time you read this, things might well have changed.
“If you’d like a bit of extra security on top of your geoblock-foiling, and perhaps the option to download from BitTorrent anonymously, then a VPN is a better bet than a smart DNS service.”