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Month: June 2017

How to Pick a VPN Provider – Your Ultimate Guide

How to Pick a VPN Provider – Your Ultimate Guide

Published by Allison Gilbert on June 28, 2017

If you’re looking for some useful tips and advice that will guide you in choosing a quality VPN service, then you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we’re going to highlight the key features you should look for in a provider. By the time you’ve finished reading, you will know exactly what you need. And with this in mind, let’s get straight to it.

Decide Which Features You Need

There’s no denying that a modern VPN service can offer a wide range of different features, but you will not necessarily need all of them. Of course, there’s no point in paying for more than you’re going to use, so it’s wise to assess your needs first.

Questions to ask yourself will include whether you need to ‘geo shift’ your location, whether you need full anonymity, or whether you simply need something to protect you when you’re using a public Wi-Fi network.

Once you have a solid understanding of the features you need, you’ll be better prepared when it comes to selecting a service that gives you what you’re looking for.

Check Their Server Locations

Any well-respected VPN service will be able to provide you with multiple servers in many different countries. In particular, it’s a good idea to ensure they have many different US-based services if you’re going to be using websites such as YouTube and Netflix, as these kinds of services may restrict your content depending on where your VPN is located.

These days, you can expect any quality service to have dozens, if not hundreds of stable and reliable servers across the world, so it’s a good idea to go with a company that can provide these features for you.

Check Whether They Keep Logs

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons why somebody may turn to a VPN service is to protect their identity online. It’s smart to select a service which will keep the minimal amount of details about your activity.

Fortunately, many of the leading VPN services boast the fact that they do not keep any logs at all, and this is certainly a big benefit if you’re looking to protect your identity. In fact, it’s best to skip on any service that does not offer this seemingly basic feature. There are also several other privacy related issues to be on the lookout for.

Check Their Bandwidth and Speed

There’s nothing more frustrating than selecting a VPN service that seems to be a good deal on the surface, only to find that their servers are slow, prone to crashes, and restrict your bandwidth use. Just take a look at this speed test of Pure VPN. Not looking to great, is it?

Because of this, it’s very important to select a VPN service that will allow you to unleash the full speed of your Internet connection, or at least get very close to it. Nowadays, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to find a service that will give you unrestricted bandwidth and very high speeds, and you certainly shouldn’t settle for anything that hampers you in this regard.

If you need more information on VPN speed and how to find one that strikes the right balance between usability and performance, visit our friends at www.fastestvpnguide.com. They do all the boring work for you by speed testing and comparing most of the top services available today.

Do They Allow Concurrent Connections?

Another important feature of many VPN services is the ability to give you concurrent connections, which means you can use the service through multiple computers, laptops, and smartphones. This is certainly a handy feature that you may or may not need, but if you’re going to protect your entire household with your VPN service, then it is something you’ll need to consider.

5 Tips to Keeping Your Computer Network Secure

5 Tips to Keeping Your Computer Network Secure

Published by Allison Gilbert on June 25, 2017

Smartphones, computers, tablets, and other Internet-enabled devices have become an integral part of our lives. With many of us using these tools to transact, conduct business, and stay connected with loved ones, it’s important that we keep our hardware locked down at all times. Dropping your guard even for a second could give hackers, and other cyber criminals access to your devices and network, a risk you wouldn’t want to take.

The first step to ensuring your computers and other internet-enabled devices are secure is by ensuring your computer network is safe and buttoned up tight. Outlined below are a few tips on how to secure your computer network.

Encrypt All Wireless Access Points

An unsecured wireless network gives access to everyone within the signal’s reach. Malicious individuals take advantage of unsecured networks to gain access to devices and computers connected to the said network. This can be quite risky for both your business and personal info.

Ensuring all wireless access points are secured with a strong passcode can, however, help keep intruders away. Although locking down your MAC addresses may seem handy, using WPA2 encryption for your networks can be just as safe and is recommended.

Hide Your SSID

Preventing your routers from broadcasting the SSID provides and an extra layer of security to your computer systems. For someone to gain access to the network, he/she would need both the SSID and paraphrase, which are hard to detect.

In addition to this, hiding the SSID works more like the 2-step verification method, hence much safer than when broadcasting it. If hiding SSID isn’t an option, you should consider changing the wireless network name to something more informative. Most routers broadcast their name and versions by default. Be sure to modify this to make life harder for hackers.

Manage Your Printer and File Sharing

File and printer sharing creates loopholes in the network that cyber-criminals can exploit to gain access to your computer. Disable all forms of sharing on your PC to prevent access, and only leave file sharing on a secured file server.

This step is of particular importance for individuals using laptops and tablets. You don’t want your computer to broadcast your entire file system to everyone connected to the network, especially when traveling.

Install security patches and OS updates

Both personal and work computers should have automatic OS updates turned on to help keep them updated. These software updates help fix bugs that cybercriminals exploit.

In addition to this, allowing OS updates provides additional security to your files and computer systems. Leaving your computer ignored for too long makes it vulnerable to exploitation, where hackers can plant malware to the systems.

Your router too needs to be updated to the latest firmware. Like with the OS, this gives it more protection from external attacks, hence an excellent way to keep hackers out.

Invest in a Good Firewall

In addition to enabling all firewalls on the router, you may still have to install an additional firewall on your desktop computers. Such firewalls not only restrict access to computer files but also make it hard for a cyber criminal to inject malicious code. You will also need a reliable antivirus software capable of detecting malware and spyware.

After implementing all these measures to secure your computer network, you can then invest in a VPN for added security online. VPNs not only encrypt network connections and traffic but also make it hard for hackers to sniff data/traffic. For more info, see our guide on how to choose a VPN service. Once you’re using one, you’ll wonder how you ever survived without one.