Free vs. paid VPNs: Which is better?
VPNs used to be a premium product, but you don’t have to spend big money on them anymore.
Some companies now offer a basic service that won’t cost you a thing. Are the free VPNs as good as their paid-for counterparts then? Not so fast.
As you’d expect, there are catches, and they typically start with a data cap. Avira Phantom VPN’s free plan limits you to 500MB a month, PrivateTunnel offers 2GB, whereas ZPN has a generous 10GB allowance — not bad at all.
Free products also typically have usage restrictions. Most companies don’t want you to soak up all their bandwidth on torrents, so ZPN is typical in blocking P2P.
Hide.me’s 2GB free plan also has some common limits. There’s “best effort” bandwidth, which means paying customers have speed priority and you get what’s left. And the choice of locations is limited to three: Canada, Netherlands and Singapore.
Hola’s free-for-personal-use plan doesn’t have the same kind of restrictions, but even here there’s a catch. The service routes traffic through its free users rather than dedicated servers, so signing up allows others to (securely) share a small part of your bandwidth and resources.
Then there’s the adverts and the session limits and the general lack of service level agreement: free means that it doesn’t come with any implicit warranties.
Free plans are fine for simple needs, then — maybe protecting your laptop’s wireless hotspot traffic on the occasional trip — but if you’re looking for anything more advanced, a commercial product is best.
The immediate benefit is that you know your personal data remains safe, even if you’re on a public Wi-Fi hotspot. Local snoopers might be able to see the connection, but there’s no way to find out what it is or where it’s going.
VPNs also give you a new digital identity in the shape of an IP address from another country. This makes it harder for websites or anyone else to track you, allows some people to bypass government censorship, and helps the rest of us avoid those “not available in your country” messages on YouTube or other streaming sites.
Best of all, despite the low-level network technology involved, you don’t need to be any kind of expert to make VPNs work. For the most part, all you have to do is choose the country where you’d like an IP address, click Connect to start, Disconnect when you’re done — and that’s it.
“VPNs also give you a new digital identity in the shape of an IP address from another country. This makes it harder for websites or anyone else to track you.”