There are several types of VPN services ranging from basic free options to premium paid ones. What’s the difference between them? Which type should you choose?
We’ll help you figure that out.
How does it work?
VPNs use a tunnelling protocol and secure it using encryption techniques to protect the data they transmit. A VPN service provides you with online privacy. It creates a virtual tunnel that connects your PC, smartphone, or tablet to a remote VPN server.
Your internet traffic travels through this tunnel, so your personal IP address is hidden from the outside world. Because the internet is made up of lots of smaller networks, the traffic must go through each of these networks to reach its destination.
Therefore, an individual network can see the IP address of the device and the traffic being sent. If you connect to a VPN server in another country, your traffic would appear to be coming from that country, instead of your own.
This way it’s much harder for others to trace where you are and what you’re doing online. It’s also important to know that your internet service provider can still see your internet traffic. Even when you connect over a VPN.
You can think of a VPN as a tunnel between your PC and destinations on the internet (like Netflix). Instead of making your PC go out onto the internet, you let Google’s servers do that for you while your computer stays secure behind its firewall.
Then Google sends all traffic it receives through the encrypted tunnel to your PC and back again. The end result: You get protected data and Google collects a lot of useful data like page performance and usage statistics so it can improve its services.
What are the types of VPN?
There are a few main types of VPN services:
PPTP VPN
PPTP stands for Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol. It uses the same protocol that is used in the Point-to-Point Protocol used in dial-up networking. They’re beginning to phase out the older PPTP protocol, but it’s still widely used by many VPN service providers. It’s fast but also has been known to have security issues, which is why it’s not recommended.
L2TP VPN
The Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) is a combination of PPTP and Layer 2 Forwarding (L2F), a technology developed by Cisco Systems, Inc. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) mandated that the two technologies be combined into a single tunnelling protocol that represents the best features of PPTP and L2F. This is to avoid having two incompatible tunnelling protocols competing in the marketplace and causing customer confusion. This technology is often referred to as “L2TP/IPsec” because it is somewhat different from traditional L2TP.
SSTP VPN
The Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) is a Microsoft proprietary implementation of SSL VPN that uses the HTTPS protocol over TCP port 443. Because SSTP runs over HTTPS, it prevents traffic from being intercepted on the way between your computer and our servers.
It has been around since Windows XP SP2, but only got publically released with Vista SP1. Note that you must have Vista SP1 or greater installed on your PC before you can enable SSTP support. A major advantage of this technology is that you can use almost any browser to connect to your corporate network over the SSL connection (since HTTP is transmitted as SSL).
The biggest drawback of SSTP is that only Windows XP SP2 or greater can be used to host an SSTP server and client connections are supported only from XP SP1 and greater clients. Also keep in mind that just like L2TP, SSTP uses only 128-bit encryption strength by default, so if you wish to increase this you will need to use either one of our other VPN solutions or implement IPSec encryption yourself on your network.
OpenVPN
OpenVPN is an open-source software application that implements virtual private network (VPN) techniques for creating secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities.
It uses a custom security protocol that utilizes SSL/TLS for key exchange. OpenVPN is capable of traversing network address translators (NATs) and firewalls. It was written by James Yonan and is published under the GNU General Public License (GPL).