The VPN industry is pretty full these days, with hundreds of companies either providing their own built platform or reselling from third party providers, with this in mind, we wanted to explain why we decided to get into this market and why our service is a little different.
First, let’s have a little look at three well known VPN providers and how the basic features/systems compare to our current platform (as of February 2023):
| Host Media | NordVPN | ExpressVPN | IPVanish | |
| # of Devices | 10 | 6 | 5 | No Limit |
| Locations | 5 | 60 | 94 | 75+ |
| Bandwidth Limits | None | None | None | None |
| Apps Available (iOS, Android, etc) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Encryption Security | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Privacy Built-in | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Price Per Month (£ GBP | ex VAT) | £21.53 | £50.28 | £68.40 | First Year: £39.91 Then: £74.17 |
As you can see, the general features are pretty much the same, the big differences are number of VPN locations to connect too, number of devices and the price.
When we first started looking into a VPN service and comparing our initial thinking to others in the industry, one thing became very apparent, we could offer the cheapest VPN service, with all the important security features but focus on a limited number of great locations and recommend a supported, well known and maintained third party app for customers to use.
Say hello to OpenVPN, you might not know this, but OpenVPN powers a lot of VPN service providers core systems, it is used by businesses all over the world, from small to large corporations, and they specialise in cyber security. They also provide a VPN application for all major devices, such as iOS, MacOS, Windows, Linux, and Android. So there was no need for us to reinvent the wheel, they have a bigger team of experts to develop their applications, so we left that with them and we link to all their applications for our customers to install.
The next task was making it simple and secure to download OpenVPN profiles, these profiles are the setup for each VPN location we provide and is allocated to each user. This is how we know how many devices are connected, it isn’t for such things as monitoring your network usage, which would go against the point of data security and ensuring your privacy, e.g the goal of a good VPN. Our customers can easily login to their client portal, download the OpenVPN profile for any location and get connected, as you can see from the below screenshot of our customers client portal:
Each download icon, will generate your OpenVPN profile to simply open in the OpenVPN app or any supported application, you can see from the screenshot above we recommend other VPN clients if you prefer to use something else.
Each location we provide allows you to protect your privacy, have a secure connection to the internet no matter if you are at home or at your local café.
You maybe asking, why would you select a provider that has less locations to connect too? It is a good question, but one we can answer based on our own customer focus research, our VPN has been designed to focus on securing your connection with fast speeds, instead of most other VPN providers which focus on attempting to bypass streaming providers network blocks so you can appear to be from the USA and watch TV shows only available in that country. Not saying our VPN doesn’t also attempt this, but we have focused our locations on our primary customer base; United Kingdom, United States, Germany, and Japan, with more coming in the near future.
Conclusion
So, by removing the need to develop our own in-house application for every device, we were able to keep our focus on what we deem important, great security using a range of locations, easy to use platform with lots of flexibility and providing the cheapest service possible. Simple!
Oh, and did you know you can try the service for just £1 for the first year!