How do I pick a VPN provider?

Question

There's a lot of VPN providers out there. Some are free, some are for a fee, some report to the government, some inject ads int your HTTP, some are in other countries, you might not have any real promise of security when using these services.

How do you go about shopping for a VPN provider that won't just sell or give away your data? What criteria should I use? Is setting up my own VPN through a web host somewhere a more secure option?

Answer 1

First you should ask your self: What advantage does a VPN provider have over providing your own with something like OpenVPN? If you are paranoid you could get a Virtual private Server(VPS) host. Other than that I would make sure that the service was fast, cheap and wasn't in the news for a security breach.

Answer 2

If you are concerned about government eavesdropping, then you might take national privacy laws and the political situation into consideration, i.e. choose VPN providers unlikely to cooperate with local authorities. Cablegate revealed that some countries cooperated with the U.S. more than others, for example. Sweden played lapdog. Austria annoyed the U.S. etc.

As an aside, you should consider using HTTPS Everywhere whether using a VPN or not. HTTPS Everywhere has become the default in the Tor Browser Bundle.

Answer 3

I'd definitely pick foreign VPN and make sure that they have a clear zero log policy.

Her's an interesting read:

http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/

Answer 4

depending on situation and your goals answer may range from "all providers that you do not control can sell you out" to "any provider that 'fast, cheap and wasn't in the news for a security breach' will do" :)

In extreme case when you want to be 100% sure you are safe and no one watching/changing your traffic, own VPN server is not more secure. you need end to end encryption. HTTPS, SSH, etc.