CyberGhost
A fast service with a free or paid option
If you really don’t want to pay for a VPN service, CyberGhost is one of a number of suppliers that now offers a completely free service. It’s speed limited, times out after three hours and you generally have to wait in a queue to get connected, but it works. You don’t even have to sign up or provide any personal information: just download and run the app or browser add-on.
And the speeds on the free service are actually quite reasonable: we hit 1.84Mbps to the US when we tested this service, which is plenty to support a smooth SD quality stream. If you want HD-quality streams, however, you’ll have to subscribe. With a subscription active, we hit 10.2Mbps to the US, which is good enough for even high definition streams. The paid service also gets you access to the full list of 30 countries and the ability to select which individual server you’re using within that country.
Unfortunately, both Hulu and Netflix were blocked when we tested CyberGhost, which is a big black mark if you’re looking to use it to avoid geoblocks. This was true for both the free and paid versions of the service.
Another black mark is the high cost of the service, especially if you want more than one device to use it simultaneously. And although it has a nice interface and a lot of useful extras like ad-blocking, site compression (for data reduction on mobiles), a SOCKS5 Proxy, PP2P/LT2P/ IPSec support, a kill switch, IPv6 and DNS leak protection and even security-suite style web filters and HTTPS forcing (similar to HTTPS Everywhere), all that still doesn’t justify the price tag.