There are a number of good VPN service providers out there, but if you've never signed up for one, you might get lost in the maze of price plans, technical terms, and promises. Before you sign up, here are a couple of things to look for to make sure you get the best service for the least amount of money.

Don't believe every review you read

An important part of purchasing any service online is reading reviews from other customers. Many people have their own blog, or there may be a tech-blog that does professional reviews. This is good. However, there are just as many 'fake' reviews as there are genuine ones. I say 'fake' for this reason. In order to make commissions off of sales, some people will set up websites labeled "VPN Review Sites", with information about the VPN services, and links to the site. This is fine, but these people have never actually tried the VPN service, and just take information off of the site, rework it, and write it on their blog. You can tell these review sites by their short reviews, no personal information/stories, and plenty of links encouraging you to go to the site immediately.

Get something with a money back guarantee

No matter how many good reviews you read, and how confident a service is, if they don't offer a money back guarantee for more than a couple days, there's something wrong. With the myriad of different operating systems, different country location, styles of internet connection, and type of work online to be done through the VPN connection, there's plenty of opportunity for problems to come up. A VPN service needs to give you some time to take it for a test drive, with the confidence that their service is good enough to keep you hooked. A standard trial period is about 7 days, with as many as 30 days being possible. Just a few hours or even one day is not enough!

Some specific features to look for

When choosing a VPN service provider, there's a number of features that you'll see repeated site after site. Unlimited bandwidth means you can have unlimited calls, browsing, streaming, download, upload, chatting, and use of other software while connected to the VPN server. Unlimited server switching means you can change your IP at will, and won't have to pay a dime for it. VPN servers in multiple locations around the world will give you not only a variety of countries to change your IP address to, but also means that if one location/VPN server seems to be slow, you can change to a faster server without a problem. Live chat is another feature that many VPN services are beginning to feature that can make dealing with any technical issues or billing questions very quick and easy.