Settled on Astrill as my VPN service

For a while I have been looking into different ways to gain a bit more privacy while online. I love the internet, and I do think it is the greatest invention of the 20th century, however, political parties and their archaic outlook on new technologies, slows down the natural progress of it. One of the main problems with the internet is privacy. Laws have not been evolving as quickly as the community, so a lot of them are outdated and infringe on basic freedoms already achieved in the real world. For that reason, I have decided that investing a little bit on a VPN service would be worthwhile.

I did a fair bit of research, and ended up settling on Astrill. I looked at a lot of different services, and as a package I think Astrill's service really suited my needs. One of the other contenders was "Hide my ass", which seems to be one of the most popular services out there. Indeed it was one of the ones I was most interested in. However, HMA made big news at one point when the folks from lulzSec got caught. Apparently HMA did provide authorities with logs that gave away a lot of vital information about its members. So entirely due to principles, in this case being that it makes no sense to pay a fee for privacy, if privacy is not really garanteed. It's not like LulzSec killed anyone.

The other big contender was Strong VPN, which I almost signed up with before I had done more reading. Their prices seem fair, and they do have a lot of options in terms of where their servers are, however, I really was looking for a service that included servers in different countries, freedom to switch servers frequently, the ability to connect via PPTP or OpenVPN. At Strong VPN, the ability to have all those things would cost me quite a lot, so I decided to go with Astrill. They offered pretty much all I wanted for a decent price if you do at least a 3 month contract.

The installation in Ubuntu as well as Windows 7 was easy. On Ubuntu you may need to download OpneVPN through apt-get, but after that you just click to download a small client. Windows just requires the client. I'll use it during the next few months, and I'll post if I encounter any problems.