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Keep reading to find out how a VPN works, what all those special terms mean, and most importantly, how to choose the best VPN service for you! The best VPN services: Quick List We've got you covered, whether you want the best overall, the absolute safest, or the fastest VPN. That's why we've compared and reviewed the best VPN services around today. Sure, most will offer the same basic data encryption but if you want a service that you can honestly rely on, only the best will do. Unfortunately, not just any old VPN will do, and not all VPNs are created equal. There are hundreds of VPN providers to choose from, and in TechRadar's 15 years of content, we've conducted countless reviews on over 100 VPN providers to curate this list of the top 16. With a VPN (also known as a Virtual Private Network), you encrypt your data and spoof your location, letting you stream geo-restricted content, and access websites that may otherwise be blocked. This trust can come from a few factors, in order of reputability: The company’s no-logs promise has been proven by a court challenge, numerous third-party audits have verified the service’s claims, or you might just take the company at its word-yikes.While nearly all the top VPN services offer similar features, a few stand out from the pack regarding features, speed, and privacy. You ultimately have to trust that they’re not doing it. We say “promise” since there’s no real way to know for sure that a VPN isn’t logging your activity. That means that the service should include a promise not to maintain logs of any kind, with everything going to /dev/null-a non-existent directory on Linux systems that means all logs are permanently lost. The next thing you want is a VPN that has an ironclad no-logs promise from the service provider, because nobody wants to be exposed downloading free and open source software. The speeds are usually good, and most services include Swedish servers in their networks along with many other countries that are torrent-friendly. Most VPN services will specify which servers allow torrents, but a popular and easy choice is Sweden. This avoids the issue of dealing with torrents being blocked outright when all you want to do is load up Ubuntu on that new laptop. Service locationįor that reason, we recommend using VPN services that are based outside the U.S., and from those VPNs you should use servers based in countries that are friendlier to torrents. On top of that, many other VPN services don’t want to end up in a lawsuit like their competitors and actively disallow torrenting on their American servers. A number of other VPN services are also involved in pending legal action, including ExpressVPN and ZenMate, as reported by TorrentFreak.
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