Is a home VPN a good idea?

An IT friend of mine recommended this same service. I am also curious to hear folks' houghts

 

the best reason would be it allows one to retain a constant email address... instead of being forced to get a new email address each time the internet provider is changed... '

 

Lots of companies offering VPNs right now. Here's one that I'm considering:

https://www.purevpn.com/vpn-service/noscript-special.php

 

??? Who still uses the email from their provider?

Yahoo and then Gmail (moreso now) pretty much took over that world.

Everyone I know with a VPN is using it for pirating movies through sites like popcorn time... as well as other torrents.

 

I have a router on a VPN and one without.

A lot of banking websites and Netflix don't allow connections through a VPN, so you'll need the ability to bypass it.

 

I only use a VPN when doing work. The rest of the time I do not.

 

It won't be completely transparent.

A few apps and services may have problems and you'll have to develop work-arounds. Some VPN providers are frequently used by spammers, phishers, and malware sources and are blocked by web services and sites.

 

VPN really has nothing to do with your email address.

 

VPN about to become of more interest to a lot of people as internet service providers gear up for being able to sell your browsing habits to the highest bidder. (December will be here before you know it)
Several sites have tried to do reviews of the best VPN service and concluded it was a monumental task. Problem is the complexity of determining how secure the service really is and how far are you willing to go to achieve privacy? Do they log your activities? Do they say they don't but logs do exist? Do they give up those logs easily? Is a man-in-the middle attack possible? Are you trying to conceal your location or merely the sites you are looking at? Are you willing to put up with the delays caused by a Tor browser? Etc, etc.
I've used a VPN on my home (non-consumer grade) router to permit secure private connections when traveling, commercial services to conceal location and OpenVPN just to see what it was all about. I'm currently looking into Streisand which is a software package that configures a VPN on a server on the Amazon cloud - even on the free tier if you don't need a whole lot of data.

 

Depends on the software/provider. Some you can turn on and off from a control panel or switch your network connection if it is router based. Others you might need to reboot. I usually run 2 or 3 computers at the same time, so I just set one up as the VPN machine and used that one for any tasks I wanted to use the VPN. There were still a couple of annoyances (this was several years ago and I can't remember exactly what any more) and I finally turned it all off. I'm thinking of restarting it again, but haven't done so yet.

You can also expect to be nagged for a while as yahoo, google, banks, and others are tracking your IP location these days and will detect a VPN connection as being from an unfamiliar location and want you to confirm this is really you.

 

Like, I literally have two different routers running two different networks. One has a router level VPN, the other doesn't. If I want to use the VPN, I connect to that network (either with wifi or an ethernet switch). If I don't, I connect to the other one.

If you don't have the technical skill to set up a VPN client on your router, you can buy them preconfigured from flash routers.

 

flashrouters.com. It's a company.

You buy a VPN subscription and they preconfigure a router to use it. I prefer Private Internet Access due to speed and ease of use.

A VPN for remotely connecting to a business use is a little different than one for anonymous browsing. With this kind of service, imagine that instead of writing letters directly to your intended audience with your return address written on the envelope you are sending a message to your VPN who forwards the letter onto the final destination with THEIR return address on the envelope. Everything goes in and out of them and all traffic from you looks like it is only going to the VPN. To your ISP, the only thing you talk with is the VPN and all HTTPS traffic is totally unknown to them.

 

Think of the VPN as a private tunnel through the public internet. The act of logging in to the corporate VPN brings up the tunnel and, from then on, all of your traffic intended for the corporate network passes through that secure private tunnel. Depending on company policy you may also have all of your web browsing going through the private tunnel but some companies opt to not do this to conserve bandwidth.

 

airvpn, you welcome