9 Things You Should Use A VPN For

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is an essential tool for your online activities. Fundamentally, a VPN keeps you anonymous and more secure online by acting as a tunnel where your encrypted data travels down. 

With the current climate of increased surveillance and the invasive policies from authorities, using a VPN should be a priority in your transactions. Fortunately, incorporating VPN provides benefits that go way beyond security. Shoppers, travelers, TV streamers, and torrents find VPN a fantastic tool no wonder there’s now a holiday for VPN. This guide highlights a dozen use cases to showcase how advanced technology works in your favor. 

1. Online Shopping

If you happen to travel overseas, you can still order items from your favorite retailer and find them at home when you get back. However, if you are yet to incorporate a VPN, things may get messy when ordering items for your home. Sure, you’ll access your favorite retailer’s site, but you end up at the retailer’s country-specific website. 

Using a VPN server in your home country enables you to access your country’s site even when you sign in from a different location. You simply access the site as if you were present locally. This way, you can use your credit card or home bank account to ship your address. 

2. Avoid Tracking

With the growing controversy, internet service providers (ISPs) are obsessed with tracking subscribers for numerous reasons. The providers claim they do so to target advertisers and prospect clients, but there are more than enough reasons why you should seek anonymity via VPN. 

Besides, previous concerns have now ballooned and cases emerged of ISPs selling user data like app usage, location data and surfing history. If you have these and any concerns regarding tracking, you need to install a VPN server on all your devices for a reasonable defense against privacy invasion. 

3. For Remote Access to Your Home Network

The new norm of working from home means that you have crucial files at home that you need to access frequently. The odds are that you have a network-attached storage (NAS) or primary desktop at home, complete with a collection of data and files on it. For this reason, you may want to set up remote access to these systems to get hold of those crucial files. Note that the connection must be safe to avoid tracking and data leaks that could be catastrophic. Hackers could also use the network to access your personal information and use it for malicious activities. Using a VPN is the ultimate way to keep your connection with the home systems secure. 

4. Using public Wi-Fi

Thanks to advanced technology, many public centers offer free Wi-Fi for customers and visitors. Today, you find people clinging to the free service on hotels, coffee shops, airports, libraries, and schools to name a few. Using these networks to access social media platforms and perhaps reply to several emails has become common.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy for hackers to intercept the Wi-Fi network traffic and access the personal information you use on those platforms and emails. While home routers use encryption protocols to secure the traffic, public hotspots leave access to all and sundry through a shared password. 

If you want to use such an insecure connection, it’s advisable to incorporate a VPN to keep your traffic encrypted and secure data. 

5. Privacy from Website

You probably have noticed that whenever you search for an item online, ads promoting similar products start appearing when you visit subsequent websites. This type of tracking should concern you as it shows that a particular website used your information somewhere. Websites learn your interests from what you search and customize adverts to your PC’s IP address as a method to generate revenue. A good countermeasure is incorporating a VPN that hides your IP and wards off the nuisance adverts. 

6. Anonymous Downloading

Torrents or peer-to-peer downloads are becoming popular day by day. There are many legal use cases, such as downloading open-source software like LibreOffice or the Linux distro. Of course, the torrents are also used for illegal copyright-violating downloads facilitated by attackers. 

The attackers follow all the downloads you make, seeking to monitor and compromise your system so they can amass crucial information. Some of the data acquired through this means could be turned over to authorities, while others might sell it to the highest bidders. So, if you are a torrent download fan, it would be best to use a torrent VPN as attackers use your IP address to collect personal information. Having a VPN would be the most effective and straightforward solution to ward off any potential information breach in your download activities. 

7. Evade Geo-Restriction

Most popular TV shows are restricted only to people in a specific geographical area. This makes it hard for you to watch the latest series in your favorite sequel if you happen to be out of the set geographical location. 

Besides, certain governments crackdown on internet connectivity within their borders mainly to deprive the citizens of the freedom of speck or mobilization. The controls also censor global social media and news sites beyond the state’s jurisdiction. Sometimes, the restriction extends to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), allowing citizens access to only state-owned services. A prime example is the UAE which bars access to Skype and WhatsApp and allows state-controlled Du and Etisalat services.

Directing a VPN via a server in a different country should unblock all the restricted apps. Note that your anticipated usage should determine the VPN provider you choose. Check out for the best iPlayer VPN, Netflix VPN, or any other streaming VPN that will address the geo-restriction issue. 

8. Bypass Traffic Policing and Shaping

Packet shaping, a.k.a. traffic shaping, involves analyzing internet traffic and processing it to conform with a set pattern. Large corporations use this procedure to maintain a certain level of quality and performance. It means that the firm may adjust the rate at which your request is processed to maintain a steady interaction and flow of information across the system. The ISPs shape and police the traffic to throttle the bandwidth and limit what you stream or download. In this case, a VPN comes in handy as it encrypts the traffic and defies the analysis, therefore, avoiding ISPs’ speed throttling. 

9. To Beat the Hackers

Keep your home network secure by installing a VPN. Of course, we have plenty of firewalls that you can install to protect the home network or just the host device. Hackers use your IP address to find your network and launch the attack. Having a VPN keeps off the trouble as it connects you to an off-site server that changes your IP address. Therefore, any attack will head to the off-site server and not your home network. This additional layer of defense makes VPN an effective tool against malicious denizens.