I have a couple websites about anonymous surfing services, and part of the websites involves testing anonymous VPN and proxy services. There are a wide range of services out there, and I know from experience that not all are great. Some are free, some are expensive, and price is not always relative to quality. Here area few guidelines to finding what you're looking for.

Free VPN and Proxy Services

There are plenty of free solutions out there, but with free stuff, you've got to do your due diligence and find out why they're free. For example, if you just type "Free Anonymous VPN" into Google, you're just looking for trouble.

One thing you'll run into a lot is Adsense sites designed to make money. They actually provide no service at all - just a good site name with a bunch of ads on it. There may even be a decoy browser bar that looks like a web based proxy. However, typing the URL you want to unblock or browser anonymously into the bar will just take you to another Adsense site. This gets old fast.

There are some other legit, and free services out there, but they too have agendas of their own. Some VPN services offer free accounts for positive reviews on your blog. This is convenient if you have a blog, and your blog fits their criteria. Usually you need a page rank of about two or a certain number of visitors per day. Even then, the free account is for a limited time, so you'll have to find something else at the end of the trial.

Another thing, and probably your best bet, is going to be free versions of paid services. There are a number a places out there that offer free stuff as an incentive to visit their site. They of course take the opportunity to tell you about their bigger, better, and faster service. If you're looking for a temporary solution, and don't mind waiting for sites to load or videos to buffer, then go ahead. There may be certain bandwidth or other limitations (like no torrents), but for general browsing these sites shouldn't be too much of a problem.

In the end, I don't have to tell you that the fastest, the most reliable, and the best quality anonymous VPN and proxy services are going to be premium services that require a monthly fee. For a decent price one you'll probably pay about five dollars a month, but for access to more servers, unlimited bandwidth, and other perks, you may pay ten to twenty dollars a month. Depending on your bandwidth usage per month and what you plan to be doing with your encrypted connection, this may or may not be worth the price. Nobody likes waiting around and time is money, so for many users, the extra couple dollars a month is worth it.