It has taken me quite some time to work out what the best VPN provider for me is. In the process I had several bad experiences and almost gave up on using VPNs entirely. I am glad I stuck with it though, because using a VPN has been fantastic for watching foreign movies and television shows, and for accessing American sites while I was abroad. Furthermore, it has dramatically improved my security, and I am no longer concerned about someone stealing my information.

When I decided to get a VPN for the first time, I decided to base my search solely on the price of the service. This is not something I recommend doing, because in general, the services that are cheap tend to be junk. This was the case with the VPN service I ended up with. One of the first things I noticed was that my service had a data cap on it. That probably wouldn’t have been a big deal if security was all I planned on using the service for. However, it wasn’t. One of the main reasons I had got a VPN was to be able to stream television programs from other countries. Because of this, I went through the bandwidth allocated to me for the first month relatively fast.

I also experienced frequent disconnects, and the speed of my connection occasionally slowed down so much that it was unusable. The VPN allowed me to connect to United States servers easily, which was good when I was outside of the country. However, it did not have a lot of servers to choose from, and many countries were not represented. This was frustrating, because it meant that I could not access all of the content that I was interested in.

Since that point I have been more selective in my VPNs, and consider a range of factors before I sign up for any service. I am more concerned about security than I was in those days, so I specifically look for VPNs that offer L2TP VPN or better. A PPTP VPN is good for streaming content because of the lack of encryption. However, I don’t want to put my information at risk just to get better speeds, so I steer clear of PPTP VPNs.

Your best VPN provider may be different than mine, but it is out there. Don’t get discouraged if it takes you a few attempts to find one that suits you well, there is no shortage of options.