What do you think of accessing blocked sites & hiding IP address using personal VPN services?

If you are a network admin, you might be aware of the various techniques used by students/ employees to gain access to blocked sites. Right from typing IP address instead of URL, using URL shortener’s, using various proxy servers available on the Internet – various methods might be used. A paid personal VPN service is also being employed these days to access blocked sites and hide IP address. Let us read more about personal VPN services, in this article.

What is a Personal VPN Service?

The personal VPN service is similar to the organization wide VPN (Virtual Private Network) employed by the network administrators. But in this, the user directly forms a tunnel between his laptop/desktop to the server hosted by the personal VPN service provider and encrypts all the content that travels between his computer and the server.

So, if a user wants to access a website (that can be accessed only from a particular country – tracked based on the Geo-location of IP addresses), he uses a personal VPN service, reaches their server, picks up a new IP address based on the servers location and from there he is redirected to the website (that he wants to browse) by the VPN service provider. So, instead of visiting the website directly, they visit the website through the server hosted by the personal VPN service provider.

For example, certain websites like Pandora, Hulu, etc can be accessed only from the United States. So, people outside the United States can sign up for a personal VPN service provider who has a server within the United States, connect to the server and from there browse those websites with a newly acquired US IP address! One more reason for using the personal VPN service is to browse anonymously without revealing your original IP address.

The price for such a service ranges mostly from 5 USD to 20 USD per month and most of them provide multiple VPN access methods like PPTP,SSL,SSTP, etc. Some service providers have a monthly maximum bandwidth cap, while most of them offer unlimited browsing. Many personal VPN service providers have multiple servers in multiple countries and enable the user to choose which country IP address they want to use for their Internet session.

Benefits of Personal VPN Service

In certain countries that have genuine websites/services blocked, users might use them to access these services. Data encryption makes it more secure to browse websites from public Wi-Fi hot-spots/ premises where Internet is shared. Personal VPN Services can also be used to browse anonymously (to a certain extant) without revealing your IP address and hence it is possible to hide your personal details/ browsing habits to search engines/ other e-commerce based websites.

Disadvantages of Personal VPN Service

Even though people use VPN and change their IP address while browsing websites, their identity could still be traced back – Its just slightly more difficult. The VPN Service provider might get their IP address blocked, for offering such a service. Some ISP’s block all VPN connections going through them (in certain countries) but a few providers might support browsing through Stealth SSL / SSTP VPN which are difficult to block. The bandwidth consumed is still the same, if not slightly more (for the users) and their computers need to encrypt and decrypt all the sessions which might put additional strain on the processors.

Besides, a Personal VPN service could be mis-used by users in the following ways:

1. Users accessing websites that are needed to be genuinely blocked in schools/ colleges/ offices etc like social networking sites. video streaming sites. etc.

2. Users can use this service to download MP3, Videos etc anonymously.

3. Users might use this service for illegal/ disallowed activities.

4. Users might make cheap VOIP Calls (as they can pick up another countries IP address and pretend to be in that country while making those calls)

Well, like it or not these services are currently available and as a network administrator you need to be aware of them. So, next time when there are too many VPN tunnels opened by employees (which are not controlled by the organization), you might as well want to check what they are doing.

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