Not all VPN providers are created equal. Here's some things to consider when choosing a VPN provider.
Not all providers issue separate authentication information for each account. This is a major security flaw and effectively allows anyone to decrypt your traffic, rendering your VPN useless against snoops.
Also, OpenVPN uses certificates to identify users. As far as we know, we're the only provider that actually issues every user a secure certificate. While not strictly necessary, this greatly enhances the security of your VPN connection.
Most VPN providers cut costs by buying virtual servers to route customer traffic. This isn't great for performance, reliability or privacy. Shared servers are almost always unreliable, overutilized and make easy targets for intercepting communications.
Pay close attention to your provider's infrastructure, too. Do they support the same protocols on every server? Are some of their servers down?
Most providers manually install and update servers, which means that servers are more likely to go unmaintained and miss critical security updates. A dead giveaway is when not all servers support the same protocols or when some are down for extended periods of time.
In contrast, VPNme has invested considerable time in making sure all gateway locations have servers that are always up and always up-to-date. We stay on top of the latest in the security world and apply it to our infrastructure to keep our clients safe.
Messy servers are also a major inconvenience for clients that just want their VPN to work. Most providers make you choose from a big list of individual servers, each of which has different protocols support and may or may not be working at the time.
This is a real pain, and is why VPNme builds servers into clusters, which we call gateways, that provide a single point of contact. In the event that a server fails or must be updated, clients will automatically be moved to a working server in the same location without the need to make any changes.
Watch out for VPN providers that are based in countries that force them to maintain logs. Believe it or not, most countries, especially in the European Union, force companies to maintain logs.
One HideMyAss™ customer found that out the hard way when their VPN provider with headquarters in London provided evidence to be used against them in US Federal court.
VPNme is located in the United States, which has no requirement to maintain logs. While we do comply with law enforcement, we can only give them what we have. Our privacy policy clearly details the information we keep about our clients. This is important for our own protection, as well as our clients'.
You might also want to make sure the owner of your chosen VPN company isn't the same one who "lost" hundreds of thousands of people's Bitcoins. And, of course, make sure they aren't an FBI sting operation.
First and foremost, we use our own product and have built the VPN service we have always wanted. That's why VPNme supports every major protocol and has other great features like port forwarding and a built-in firewall.
One of our features is NAT mode, and it's a big deal. Normally, a VPN provider gives every client their own public IP address. This is great if you need to be able to accept incoming connections, but it means that you are the only one using that IP address and makes you more easily identifiable.
VPNme's NAT mode allows many customers to share the same apparent IP address, making it impossible to trace an outside access back to a single VPN client. Our NAT mode serves additional purposes, though. Since you aren't locked to a single apparent IP address, we can offer the ability to change your apparent IP address at a whim, or even randomly. We've never seen another provider do this.
Sometimes, even a quality VPN doesn't offer enough anonymity, which is why VPNme has built-in support for Tor and an anonymizing web proxy with Ad-blocking.
