VPN / Anonymizing services

This service provides you encrypted, unrestricted(*) and anonymous access to the internet from everywhere.

Typical scenarios:

To access pages that filters aggressively deny access to: If you are a consultant and your job depends on internet access, you know what it's like to find that many pages you need to get info from are filtered. Many places forbid access to pages that have 'blog' or other generic words in the URL, regardless of the actual page contents.

To surf in an untrusted network: If you are in a hotel, or a cybercafe, or Starbucks, you can't know for sure that no one is monitoring your activities. Our VPN provides an encrypted gateway - so no one can listen to your internet traffic.

To surf anonymously: When connected to the VPN, the IP address that each site you visit sees and logs is the VPN gateway's. Your real IP remains hidden.

To access content that otherwise wouldn't be available to you: Some pages, in particular media (TV shows for example) don't allow access from foreign countries ("Sorry, this content is not intended to be viewed from your location"). When connected to the VPN, you may be effectively be surfing from another country. Are you in Europe but want to access US content? Just ask for a US based gateway.

To use protocols that are usually not available: Even the most unrestricted places usually only allow HTTP, HTTPS, and maybe FTP. However you may need or want to use other protocols, such as IMAP,SMTP,POP3 (for email), SSH or telnet...

How does this work? What do I need for this to work?

Our VPN software (actually it's OpenVPN, an incredible open source product) works by creating a virtual network interface over a HTTPS connection. Therefore in order for it to work you need to be able to connect to an HTTPS service.

The VPN works fine even traversing proxies and page filters.

The client software is available for many platforms, including Windows, Linux and OSX. For Windows, you need administration privileges in the computer.

Restrictions

This service is intended to provide you safe and unfiltered surfing. It is not intended to be used for p2p, and it is not intended to let you do things you would not do from home. In particular, spamming is forbidden. Outbound port 25 is blocked. However, we will happily unblock it for specific hosts (i.e. if you need to access a specific SMTP gateway), free of charge.

Privacy

The connection between you, as the VPN user, and the VPN server is encrypted. This guarantees that no one between these points (such as a network admin at work) can monitor what you do. However, the connection between the VPN server and the rest of the internet will be encrypted ONLY if you are using a secure protocol, such as SSL (i.e. HTTPS).

About anonymous usage

Anonymous in this context means that other parties cannot know where your connection comes from. However, there are tracking mechanisms (such as cookies) that can still identify you.

We don't impose a traffic limit, but you need to be aware that if you are in a monitored environment a lot of traffic is bound to be noticed eventually, and you could be denied access to the VPN gateway altogether.