I am not sure if you have ever used a VPN service before, but I am certain about the fact that most of you who have used a VPN service have used it just to mask your IP address to access blocked sites on the internet. Well, that’s certainly one of the uses you can put a VPN service to, but that’s not all. VPN or Virtual Private Network is basically a technology that keeps your identity anonymous, and your connection and data secured (encrypted to be more accurate) while you are connected to the internet (and believe me, it’s not as easy as it may seem to be).

Though there are many free VPN services available you can opt for, most would likely flood your pages with ads (Hotspot is one such free VPN I know about) and you may have to compromise on the speed or a data cap restriction. If you are looking for a secure, risk-free and seamless VPN service, I’d advise you to go for a paid one. HideIPVPN is one such dedicated service we are going to talk about today. 

Installing HideIPVPN is a cakewalk, just download the file, run the setup and follow the on-screen steps to install it. One you have installed the application, launch it.

The program interface is sleek and navigation is very simple. You will have to provide your login username and password and click the login button to keep things rolling. For the time being, just to test the product, you can create a three hours free trial account and stay with me while we test it out.

Having installed and opened it, select the package, protocol and server you want to connect to and press the Connect button. The program will then connect you to the server, authenticate and start a new network connection (virtual network) on your system.

Before we proceed any further, I think we should have a detailed look at the type of package they provide and what are the distinct servers and protocols they use. HideIPVPN provides different premium packages depending upon the type of proxy and connection protocol you want. The top-most plan lets you mask your IP to that of UK, US, Netherland and Germany, and gives you of options of PPTP, OpenVPN, L2TP / IPsec and Proxy.

If you come down, you can see combinations of these servers and protocols that you can select for a specific work. For example, if all you want to download torrent files alone, you can opt for the dedicated plan for the same.

So coming back to the tool, after you have connected to a server, just test your IP. It will show a US, UK, Netherland or Germany depending upon your preferences in the connection. On the settings page, you can configure the program behavior and actions.

So that was about using HideIPVPN, but that’s not all we are going to talk about today. I took the liberty to test the service and here are the results.

I could access all the country-specific site like Hulu, Google Music, etc. using HideIPVPN and everything went on smoothly. At no point, I felt that I am browsing through a blocked site so that’s gives a +1 point to the tool

I did a speed and ping test for all the VPN servers the tool can connect to, and these are the best 10 results among then. The first one one in the list is without connecting to the VPN followed by the results of different VPN servers.

As you can see, the download speed ranges from best to worst along with the ping rate. So, if you are not getting the desired results on one of the server, try switching to a different one. It’s all about luck.  About the ping rate, its not going to hamper you much, as long as you are not planning to play online games on it. Collaborating all the results, I give it a +1.

When I used a visual routing tool to trace my packets, I was happy to see the results. All my data packets originated from the US server (the proxy, I selected), and my original source was completely hidden. So that’s a +1.

Overall, HideIPVPN is a decent tool and covers every niche a VPN service should cover. They also have different price plans catering to different VPN needs of the user so you could choose the one that suits you. Oh, before that, why not participate in our giveaway first and see if you win one. Here we go!