Do you need a personal VPN service? If you Google around so as to a lot of people use VPN services to bypass the Internet restrictions from their countries, like in the centre East or China. But a VPN can perform so much more for you.

The VPN works by encrypting all of your Internet traffic and redirecting it with a VPN server, typically located in the USA. This will have two immediate effects:

1. Your Internet traffic will be obscured from anyone “listening” on the line. Even your ISP or company will have no idea as to what your actual Internet traffic really is.

2. Your real IP address will undoubtedly be hidden from the sites you visit, thus offering you anonymity while online.

So even if you come in Wireless HotSpots, places that hackers often scout to get new victims, you can be protected when using the VPN. Firesheep, the Firefox plugin is really a preferred tool of the trade and is incredibly convenient to use, even by amateur hackers, or “script-kiddies” because they are called in the underground community. The VPN encryption will also keep you safe from the Firesheep attacks.

The bad part is that everything comes at a cost. Two main issues to be discussed here:

1. When using the VPN you’ll experience a decrease in speed. This is due to the encryption and the traffic routing. So if you are in France and you are using a VPN server, your traffic are certain to get encrypted, sent from France to the VPN server in USA and from the VPN USA server redirected to it`s original intended destination. From there the traffic flows via exactly the same route all the way back in France… That`s an extended trip right?

2. Most good VPN services are paid. There are urban vpn , but people have had bad reviews during the past about free VPN service: limits on bandwidth, poor speeds and connection drops some users say. The paid services generally do much better in terms of performance. Be prepared to pay from 10$ – 20$ monthly for a good VPN service.

Another important aspect may be the encryption the VPN uses. Currently SSL VPNs are considered to really have the safest encryption. The most famous SSL VPN protocols are SSTP and OpenVPN. Unlike other protocols they use certificates through the authentication process, creating a man-in-the-middle hacker attack extremely difficult.

So, my advice will be, if you care about your privacy and security, get a VPN service and always utilize it in networks you consider unsecured (like airport or coffee shops public networks).