It's really barely a draft

IPREDator vs. Ivacy.com VPN service – fits my needs perfectly

July 8th, 2009 Posted in software, tips, website

Privacy has always been difficult online. You could potentially do a lot of illegal things without knowing it was illegal, like downloading movies and tv shows from thepiratebay. There are of course also people who knowingly do illegal things and wants to hide it (this could also be from thepiratebay btw).

I wrote a little big about why it might be good to be a little careful when being online about a week ago here – so I won’t go into that too much. For this post I will focus on the two options I have found will suit my needs, but which should I (and you!) choose? It’s time for…

Trying for anonymity online isn’t new. Recently the Tor network has gotten some attention. Also old-timers like Freenet, free VPN connection solutions such as Hotspot Shield are there and even free proxies are touted by  enthusiasts as options, but the conclusion is always the same: It works like crap, is horrendously slow and requires a lot of work to maintain or along those lines.

For me, having a full time job, having to keep up writing posts  on my blog, running marathons, going to dive bars with my girlfriend playing dart (yup, we did that last Saturday night – I won!! woot woot!!) – sorry got sidetracked there for a minute. Anyway, bottom line?! I’m busy, I need something that works and I am willing to pay for it! I need a solution that works for my girlfriend! What works for her? Something that requires zero maintenence, zero new processses, works behind the scenes – i.e. just-works. And I have a very good incentive to keep it simple when I implement anything that affects anything she does on her computer – If it does work I have her on my back asking “when will it be fixed?”.

IPREDator.se

Alright, so looking at IPREdator, I have to say, it works beautifully. I was invited in to the beta program lasdt week and have been trying IPREDator out since then – I mean how could I resist, it cost just €15 try for 3 months, so why not?! It’s a dead simple setup (PPTP), which makes securing your connection a breeze. But the biggest thing is really the speed of the service – it’s top notch for any VPN service out there. Of course since the server is in Malmö in Sweden and I live a mere 40km away from that server, this could influence my experience compared to the other VPN solutions I have tried. At any rate, it’s as fast a my regular connection (10Mbit download), so there’s not performance loss.  Another great thing is that all ports seem to be forwarded, so direct connections when downloading torrents works blazingly fast. Hope this holds true even after they start en open beta or release the final service.

Really, for me, the only real downside of the service is that the IP is Swedish and therefore I cannot access all the American or UK only services I use/want to use. I’m thinking hulu.com video, last.fm radio, iBBC Player video, pandora.com radio and all the TV network sites.

But I highly recommend it. Go get signed up already on ipredator.se for the beta and they’ll probably invite you soon enough.

Ivacy.com

I actually signed up for Ivacy.com just a week or two before I got let in the IPREDator.se beta program, and I have to say I am really impressed by all the things it has to offer. It’s also therefore pretty sad that the service has some severe reliability issues in relation to speed and to access points.

Now don’t get me wrong, ivacy.com is AWESOME and I really recommend it. They have a lot of very useful services that make it stand out compared to other services, as long as they fix their speed and access point reliability. Regarding speed, this could of course be somewhat low because I am located in Denmark and the access point I use is in the US (probably the West Coast), which could influence the results. But there’s no excuse that the access point has been down!

Enough about the problems, let’s look at what you get with the service. Now it’s almost double the price of IPREdator, so obviously they have to offer more. I can’t mention all of it in this post, but you can check it out in the pros/cons table below. I will say that the full binary usenet access is very nice, but the really killer feature for me is the private dark net (meaning a kind of internet available only when you are connected securely and anonymously to through the ivacy vpn connection). The dark currently has 4 cool services that makes it totally worth the money.

The most important and useful one is instant.torrents.site (<= link only works when you are connected through the ivacy vpn btw). Here yo you can get the instant-torrents site to download any torrent to the site and then you just download it via regular HTTP download afterwards (with resume). The cool part is of course twofold – you’re not exposing yourself to downloading of torrents at all and you don’t have to leave your computer turned on while it happens. And it works brilliantly! Especially useful if you are donwnloading very big torrents. Another cool feature is the instant-music.site (again, only when connected via vpn), where you have all popular music to download instantly. It’s a like an iTunes store for cheap.

The final feature I would like to highlight is the fact that you can connect via UK, Russian or US access points (US access point currently down at time of writing…grrr….), which means you can get access to e.g. US only sites. This means, for me, that I can see all the tv shows I follow online via hulu.com, the respective networks homepages (e.g. cbs.com), internet radio sites (e.g. last.fm – which costs $3/month in  Denmark for free radio) and of course this also applies to setting up VPN on the iPhone to e.g. use the Pandora, last.fm radio applications or download applications that are only available in the US App store.

Also, with ivacy.com you get several connection options compared to IPREDator. You can of course setup a regular PPTP VPN setup, but you can also download a Firefox extension which allows you to just secure the Firefox application instead of everything on the comptuer (works great for using the instant-torrents.site service). There’s also a pre-compiled Firefox browser for download that can be run from a USB drive with instant anonymity! great stuff!

So go sign up and get 100MB free traffic to test out the service. Sign up here

Which should you/I choose in the end?

It’s a tough choice. It really depends on your needs. If all you want it anonymous an fast download of torrents, then IPREDator.se is definitely the way to go, but if you also use internet radio, need access to US only sites, use usenet service or see value in the darknets available that I described above, well then it’s no-brainer, ivacy.com is definitley a-go!

You might also be interested in reading:

1. Anonymous SIP – yet another reason to use ivacy.com as your VPN provider
2. IPREDator VPN for anonymous filesharing and an introduction to the alternative
3. Getting new music by recording it with LastSharp (English)
4. Mvix Ultio: My new “Special Retirement payout (SP)” funded media center (English)
5. Translate any page into any language or use the free ordbogen.com dictionary alternative