VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and is a tunnel through the Internet that allows a computer, phone, tablet or other device to connect securely to another network, as if it were physically plugged into that network. VPNs are very widely used to give remote workers access to corporate networks.
In our case, it allows our customers to connect securely to the Internet via our network, bypassing monitoring, censorship, blocks and other issues with the customer's local Internet connection. VPNs employ encryption to prevent eavesdropping by intermediate parties and to ensure that no modification of the data can take place in transit.
While the Internet was envisioned by its creators to be a pure medium for the transmission of data without arbitrary restrictions, the current Internet is increasingly guided by the politics of commerce. It is now subject to the whims of governments and corporations that stand to profit from limiting access to resources, monitoring your activities and being able to uniquely identify you.
Their best tools for these tasks are your public IP address and the ability to inspect the data you transmit and receive. A quality VPN robs them of both.
We're headquartered in Delaware, United States.
While it's common rhetoric that the United States is hostile to privacy, in our case at least, that's not true. Unlike companies in the EU, Canada and elsewhere, we are not obligated to store any information about our customers' usage. Combined with strong technical countermeasures against eavesdropping, that makes the US ideal for our purposes as a VPN provider.
Proxy servers, like HTTP, Socks and Tor, work by intercepting connections made by individual applications on your computer, then initiating a connection of their own and directing your data through that. Their usefulness is limited mainly to TCP services that are compatible with being proxied, like web browsing.
A VPN, on the other hand, is a raw network connection handled by your operating system, so it works with TCP, UDP and any other kind of traffic. This makes it much safer, as proxies tend to "leak" information through side channels (usually DNS), making it hard to truly hide your real IP.
That said, proxies are often convenient. You can configure a single application to use the proxy without impacting anything else, for example.
Your VPNme account includes access to the proxy service on every gateway!
We have gateways in geographically diverse locations to enhance throughput and response time for our customers. See the article for a list of available gateways:
While all of our VPN gateways support data rates of at least 1 gigabit/second, the speed at which you download is directly related to your latency to the server. That is, the longer it takes packets from your computer to get to the server and come back, the slower a single download will be. This is because TCP/IP waits for packets to come back before it will send more.
Since a VPN adds latency, it can also decrease the speed of individual downloads. This doesn't mean your connection is slower, though. The easiest way to get better speed is to use a download manager or other software that downloads a single file using many parallel connections.
Yes!
If you use IKEv2 or OpenVPN 2.3+, you will get a globally routable IPv6 address in addition to your IPv4 address. Because there's no NAT with IPv6, a firewall protects you from incoming connections.
Note: Windows 10 currently will not add a default IPv6 route in IKEv2 mode. This is a flaw in the built-in client, and we suggest that you use OpenVPN instead.
We own all of the server and network hardware we use, which is co-located in carrier-neutral facilities with locking racks, robust power and redundant cooling. Our gateways run from read-only flash memory and have no hard disks or other persistent storage. We have direct connectivity to the best Tier 1 providers and never use "blended" bandwidth.
Instead of exposing individual VPN servers like most providers, each of our gateways consists of a cluster of servers. This allows us to gracefully handle a hardware failure and ensure that no single server is ever overloaded.
Yes. We don't inspect, shape or filter any of your traffic.
The only exception is that we don't currently allow TCP connections on port 25 due to abuse. This is a very common practice and most email providers have port 587 open for this purpose.
Please check the clock on your computer or device. If you just generated your certificate, your clock may be behind and OpenVPN won't think your certificate is valid, yet.
