Lunch Time Deals: Up To 82% Off VPN Plans

Lunch Time Deals: Up To 82% Off VPN Plans
At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

When you’re buying your lunch today, you might want to take a moment and spend a little more. Gizmodo’s Lunch Time Deals posts point out any particularly good bargains for Aussie bargain hunters around the ‘net.

Today’s deal comes courtesy of PureVPN.

You can get a PureVPN 3 year plan for $92.24 ( that’s $2.56/Month) instead of $519.83 for a savings of $426.26.

Or, you can get a PureVPN 1 year plan for $65.67 – that’s $5.48/Month – instead of $173.28. This one will save you $107.61.

If you’ve gotten this far and you’re finding yourself with a few questions about what VPNs are, and what they are used for, here’s the downlow.

What is a VPN?

You may have heard a lot about VPNs over the last few months and years thanks to a few different pieces of legislation that have passed through the Australian government. One is a scheme that would see all your data collected and archived by your ISP for law enforcement purposes and the other is a system designed to block pirate sites. What both these schemes fail to address is where VPN users fit in.

Put simply, a virtual private network is a group of computers (or discrete networks) connected together through over a public network — namely, the internet. Businesses use VPNs to connect to remote data centres, or for employees to connect remotely to the physical network of their workplace. Individuals can use VPNs to get access to network resources when they’re not physically on the same LAN (local area network), or as a method for securing and encrypting their communications when they’re using an untrusted public network.

What a VPN does is route all the traffic of your computer (or your entire network, if you’re running it on a router rather than a PC) not directly to the Internet through your ISP, but first through a different server that has the effect of anonymising your traffic’s point of origin. A VPN will add an additional hop to the route your data takes between your PC and a site like Facebook, but it’s that extra hop that obfuscates its original location.

When you connect to a VPN, you launch a VPN client on your computer (or click a link on a special website), log in with your credentials, and your computer exchanges trusted keys with a remote server. Once both computers have verified each other’s identity, all of your internet communication is encrypted and secured from eavesdropping.

There are a few different types of VPN. You can pay to access a bespoke VPN provider every month which would see your data piped through a private pipe, or you can use a peer-to-peer VPN service that uses other people’s computers as the endpoints. The latter is more problematic, as we’ll cover in a moment.

Why would you need one?

There are a few different reasons to employ a VPN.

You could be a traveller who needs to access files stored on a server in your home country. You may want to use it to get access to another country’s Netflix library like the US or UK. You may want it to connect to your employer’s corporate network. You may just want it to keep your data safe and secure from anyone who might be trying to listen in.

No matter what you use a VPN for, you’ll need to keep a few things in mind.

Before you sign up

Before you start piping all of your data through someone else’s connection — whether it’s another internet denizen, or a company that specifically offers VPN services — it’s worth keeping a few things in mind about virtual private network operators.

Firstly: whether you use a VPN or not, your data is never 100 per cent safe. Ever. That means you should be especially cautious of VPN providers, given you are sending your data through their pipes from the moment you fire it up.

It’s crucial to know what your both your data and your IP address are being used for, especially when it comes to peer-to-peer VPNs. Hola was recently busted for hijacking users’ computers to sell their bandwidth, for example, and it’s a perfect example of the danger of a VPN turning you into the money-making product.

What you need to do is be sure that the VPN provider you’ve chosen to use is open and honest about its traffic and security policies. Find one with accessible documents that detail how your data is handled from point to point.

You should also make sure that the VPN you sign up to isn’t about to cap the bandwidth or the quantity of the data going through the tunnel. Make sure that when you sign up you get your money’s worth, and sign up to a plan that doesn’t limit your traffic or cap you based on certain download quotas. What’s the point of paying for a VPN, only to have it cut you off halfway through the month?

It’s also worth keeping an eye out for a VPN provider that will give you mobile options as well as desktop support. The internet goes everywhere with you on your smartphone, so your VPN should be able to as well.

Keep it simple

Depending on what you want to use your VPN for, you might not even need to shell out cash every month for access to a VPN. You may just need to keep it simple and trust Google.

Sometimes getting around certain ISP-level blocking technology is as simple as pointing your DNS settings at Google’s own DNS server.

This isn’t a VPN, but for certain uses it will have the same effect. Google’s Domain Name Servers (hosted at 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4) have been used by protesters in countries like Turkey and Egypt to get around ISP-level DNS poisoning, and now it can be used by Aussies to get around similar site blocking methods.

This won’t get you around every site block on the planet, however: you’ll still need a VPN if you want international media service like Netflix and Hulu to think you’re in a different country, or to safeguard your data through a secure tunnel.

Additional reporting by Luke Hopewell


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At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.