Hide.Me VPN Service

Over the last year, we have checked out, tested and used several VPN services and for the most part have been very pleased.  Not sure what a VPN is, check out our VPN Quick Guide (to come). We recently found Hide.Me VPN service and have been tested it for the last week or so.  There are many options out there for VPN services and after running our test, we highly recommended Hide.Me VPN.  Looking at the chart to the right, you can see some of the benefits of Hide.Me VPN, but check out the end of the post for our complete review of the service as we used it ourselves.HideMe

You might be asking yourself, why do I need to use a VPN?  My connection should be protected correct?  Well, that is kind of a loaded question, if you are connected by a wire to your local network, then your connection is semi-secure until it leaves your network and gets onto the internet, but if your using a wireless connection, you may not be secure at all.  By using a service such as Hide.me, you are protecting your connection from your computer to the VPN server you are connected to.  This can be especially important if you travel outside of your home country on business or vacation.  Using Hide.Me is a great way to make sure that you are able to still be connected and able to fulfill your needs.

Until recently, we did not know that there were certain sites that we could not access from here in the United States and have talked to people about sites that we can access, but they might not be able to get to from the United Kingdom, China or elsewhere.  Some website providers restrict content on their sites to various geographical regions.  If you are on vacation in Britain, you may not be able to watch your favorite TV shows online, as they maybe restricted to the US only.  Using Hide.Me, you can connected to a VPN server located in the US and get to those restricted sites as if you where at home.  Are you in the US looking to get to a site that is only allowed in another country, you would do the same thing with Hide.Me and connected to a VPN server either in that country or one that is not restricted.

Want to protect your surfing activities online?  A VPN is a great option to helping you hide your activities.  That being said, we are not telling you to use Hide.Me or any other VPN service for illegal activity.  You need to be sure to read the terms and conditions when you signup, as you may break them without knowing.  We have tested Hide.Me to see if it leaks out our IP address while using it and its seems to work great.  Below we will show you some of the reasons to consider Hide.Me VPN.  Pricing is fair, ranging from free to about $12 a month, this is highly comparable to others we have tested or used.  Now you might ask yourself, why not just use any free VPN, well, I guess you could, but you are placing yourself at risk.

We give Hide.Me a 4½ out of 5 rating that we use on our site for product evaluation.  Why this rating, we will explain in our review list below.  Whether you look at this information or not, we can tell you, Hide.Me VPN is one of the best and we will be using them for some time to come.

Product Review:

Pros:

  1. Pricing – they offer three pricing levels: Free, $5.42 p/m and $11.67 p/m
    This is some of the fairest pricing that we have seen for the benefits available.
  2. Locations – depending on the type of account you get, depends on how many server locations you have available
  3. Speed – we have seen create speeds out of this system, in some cases, almost double of other VPN services we have tried.  Paid accounts get priority speed over the free account.
  4. Data Transfer – again it depends on the account you get.  The paid accounts offer high, including unlimited, data transfer.
  5. Protocol Support – they support all the major protocols, PPTP, L2TP, IPsec (IKEv1 and IKEv2), OpenVPN, SSTP and SOCKS
  6. Connections – each account has a different amount of simultaneous connections
  7. Additional Features – there are extra features available to the different accounts.
  8. Devices – designed to work on various devices including desktops, laptops, phones and more.
  9. Privacy – they provide a great level of privacy protection and allows you to browse the internet anonymously.  They do not store your browsing information or log your activities.  They say they never have and never will – No Logs.
  10. Secure WiFi – they encrypt and protect your browsing while using public WiFi.  Now when you visit a business and  connect to their WiFi, you can be sure that your data is protected, otherwise, someone can see all your doing online.
  11. Bypass Censorship – watch internet tv from countries that you may be blocked from.  Access site from your home country while traveling internationally.
  12. Easy to setup
  13. Connection Protection – what we mean by this is, if the VPN connection fails for some reason, the software automatically disables the network connection until you correct the problem.  This prevents your information from being transmitted unprotected.  Out of all the VPN services we have tried this is only one of two that we found to offer this feature, but this one works better.
  14. Software – easy to install and use.

Cons:

  1. Locations – Hide.Me offers 23 server locations, but does not say how many servers they have.  We have tested some VPN services that have over 700 servers, but even though Hide.Me may have a smaller group, we still feel their speed is faster than other services we have tried.
  2. Software – while we stated above, it was easy to install and use, one this that we miss in this software is what we call a bandwidth gauge.  What we consider a bandwidth gauge is a graphic interface that actively shows the download and upload speeds of the connection. This is our reason for giving this service the rating that we did.
Chris Hodgdon's Computer Service LLC