Suggestions for VPN?

Any one have a suggestion for a good, reliable, fast VPN with a USA exit? Price less important than quality as long as it’s reasonable. Looking to get access to USA-region-only sites (eg: Hulu, Pandora, NBCFootball, etc.)

Thanks!

I use gotrusted.com

A friend of mine really likes www.strongvpn.com

I am using www.witopia.net

You have to pay for 1 year access but its ok, hulu works but a little slow (it could be the site itself rather than Witopia) and pandora works flawlessly because of its lower bandwidth requirements. Customer service answers all questions almost instantly. It’s only 60 dollars a year for the SSL account(which I recommend). They have exit gateways for several locations throughout the US, one in UK, and they just opened a gateway in Hong Kong, for those working in China and don’t want big brother blocking sites or snooping on you.

Though I haven’t used strong vpn from Taiwan, I can say that I’ve been using them for about 6 months. reasonably priced, reliable and good speeds.

[quote=“Taiwan Luthiers”]I am using witopia.net

You have to pay for 1 year access but its ok, hulu works but a little slow (it could be the site itself rather than Witopia) and pandora works flawlessly because of its lower bandwidth requirements. Customer service answers all questions almost instantly. It’s only 60 dollars a year for the SSL account(which I recommend). They have exit gateways for several locations throughout the US, one in UK, and they just opened a gateway in Hong Kong, for those working in China and don’t want big brother blocking sites or snooping on you.[/quote]

I also use Witopia…my subscription is about to end and since money’s a little tight back home I have to figure out how to pay for a new subscription from the Taiwanese side. I had the combo PPTP/SSL service but I don’t think PPTP VPN works with Hulu. A “you’re using a proxy service or VPN” warning would pop up and prevent me from accessing the site, so I’m guessing Hulu blacklisted Witopia’s DC server. SSL was ok though.

I do find that personalVPN, their software for creating a SSL connection in Windows, appears to be slower than Velocity, the software used for OSX. I would do my iTunes shopping and downloading through their VPN but for large TV shows or movies of roughly the same size the download time is almost always longer in Windows compared to OSX. This test however is in no way definitive.

Their customer service is also excellent and direct. Most of my messages seem to go to the same guy. Feels like some of their engineering personnel actually do tech support.

If you have a debit card in Taiwan you can use that to pay for your witopia subscription.

I find that the SFO and LAX server is blacklisted, but they made many more that are not. Hulu has been kinda slow lately though, I do not know if it’s software related.

[quote=“Taiwan Luthiers”]If you have a debit card in Taiwan you can use that to pay for your witopia subscription.

I find that the SFO and LAX server is blacklisted, but they made many more that are not. Hulu has been kinda slow lately though, I do not know if it’s software related.[/quote]

I have a Fubon debit card but I don’t think I can use that online.

Update: I just went ahead and tried it with Witopia and it seemed to have gone through, but I emailed their tech support about it just to be on the safe side. This was done with a Visa debit card issued from Fubon Bank and I keyed in my information in English and telephone format as +886xxxxxxxxx#yyyy xxxxxxxx = phone number yyyy = extension.

Ok, so I just signed up for Witopia. So far so good - one year for $60. I looked at the other websites listed above, and Witopia just seemed a touch better. 30-day cancellation policy.

What do I do with it?

If I go through a UK connection, I can watch the BBC iPlayer. Through American connections, I can watch Hulu. That’s cool, except I’m still not a fan of watching TV sitting at the computer.

Will this make watching PPStream, or whatever that Mainland China site is, safe? Or at least safer?

Should I use this all the time, whenever I’m on the internet, or just when I want to access other country’s websites?

Basically, should I view it like a Firewall and keep it always on, or should I just turn it on for specific reasons?

If you can manage to learn how to set up a linux server (there are plenty of guides detailing exactly how to do so on a step by step basis), I’d recommend setting yourself up with a Linode server (the minimum config at $20 works well enough for me) and set up OpenVPN. You’ll likely never get blocked by any sites for being a VPN, since you’ll have that IP all to yourself. And you can use the same account to set up unlimited web sites, etc. if you ever have the inclination to do so.

Does anyone know how long it typically takes banks in Taipei to clear debit card transactions? Fubon has not deducted the USD$63 I charged to my account with Witopia, even though Witopia claims that they’ve cleared it already.

Don’t worry about it, if the transaction goes through it will go through. What happens is when you check your balance there is account balance and available balance. When you authorize a payment your available balance will go down, and the merchant has about 30 days to post a payment, and once it’s posted your account balance will go down.

How’s the Witopia working out? I took a look at that… it seems okay… Would appreciate a real review

Kenneth

It works great, although it does slow down your usual browsing a bit, and Hulu won’t be as fast as it should, but in general you can watch the medium (360p) quality without interruptions.

Witopia has added quite a few more servers over this last year, and I believe that you can now even choose which PPTP servers to connect to rather than their DC hub. Hulu however seems to have blacklisted the PPTP DC server.

Anyone still using VPN these days? I ask because I think So-net, my ISP, is throttling my connection when I try to watch Youtube in the late evening. Not only do 720p videos stop abruptly in the middle (and shorten the displayed length of the video, telling me I’m at the end when I’m obviously not), on bad days I even have trouble with 480p and 360p. It can’t be my connection–I just did a speed test and my download speed was well over 10 Mbps. I’m hoping a VPN will fix this extremely annoying problem. Plus, it would be nice to finally be able to watch some American TV!

A friend of mine used iPredator, and he says they’re very reliable (and cheap!). They’re based in Sweden, so I don’t know if you can access US-only websites from there… worth a try, though.

ipredator.se/

One vote for Private Internet Access.

Was with StrongVPN for a year, moved to IPVanish for 3 months and back to StrongVPN.
IPVanish is NOT good for Taiwan, difficult to set-up and slow.

StrongVPN from ReliableHosting has 24/7 live support - tickets get handled within minutes. THAT is unseen service

Use it on Lax server for:

  • Netflix + iTunes movies / streaming. Perfect PPTP settings -FAST speed - 21 USD / 3 months.
    And I stream HD content on a 30 Mbps plan. No throtteling at all.
    Running my iPhone, 2 iPads and Mac + PC on 1 account .

I have no reason at all to look into other offers. Don’t fix something which is not broken :slight_smile:

[quote=“Blaquesmith”]A friend of mine used iPredator, and he says they’re very reliable (and cheap!). They’re based in Sweden, so I don’t know if you can access US-only websites from there… worth a try, though.

ipredator.se/[/quote]

I use Ipredator, and I access it from Taiwan. It works well, and as Blaquesmith said, isn’t too expensive. The big thing for me is that it works so well with Linux. Most of the VPNs probably do work with Linux, but Ipredator has detailed instructions on how to set it up and that proved very helpful. They also offer a free 3-day trial, which is what attracted me to it in the first place.