Privacy is a real concern when you’re frequently online. Websites you visit can track your IP address, ostensibly to offer you more relevant ads or to customize some aspects of the website for you. But this can violate your privacy. What’s more, when you use public Wi-Fi networks other people can even access your private information.
These problems can be solved once you use CactusVPN. With this program, you get a new IP address as you log on to their VPN server. Thus, all your Internet traffic is encrypted as it is tunneled through the server. Only when it reaches the server is it decrypted so that it can be sent to its website destination.
The practical benefit of this is that your ISP can no longer control your Internet usage. It’s not just a matter of privacy anymore. When they have restrictions as to how much data you can download, the use of CactusVPN ensures that your local ISP will have no idea how much data you’re actually downloading from the Internet.
With CactusVPN, you get 5 VPN protocols from which you can choose the best one. These are SSTP, L2TP/IPSec, OpenVPN, SoftEther, and PPTP. Not all protocols work equally well (or at all) for everyone, because it all depends on how the protocol integrates with your ISP. Each protocol also has different characteristics. The speed they offer may vary, and the stability may differ. Some are best for encryption and secure browsing, others may be ideal for media streaming, while a few may be most suitable for torrent downloading.
The CactusVPN pricing is a bit different. You pay $4.99 a month for the use of 4 servers in the US, or for 5 servers in the UK, or for 5 servers in the Netherlands (plus one in Romania). You can also choose to pay $6.99 a month with Smart DNS included, and you can use any of the 15 servers in the US.
Smart DNS is what you use when you want to unblock websites that your ISP won’t let you watch. Its use also doesn’t affect the speed of the downloads, because the video or audio content you’re downloading goes directly to you with only a small amount of traffic going through the VPN servers.
CactusVPN offers a lot of unique benefits. For example, your CactusVPN accounts are not linked to a specific device you can use any device to go online. The only limitation is that only three devices can use a single account at the same time, and only if they make use of different servers.
CactusVPN even disconnects your Internet software like uTorrent when the VPN connection drops. And when you’ve reestablished your VPN connection, your programs are automatically restarted.
To maximize your anonymity, you do get to use a static shared IP address which is mixed in with the traffic of the other CactusVPN users. But the lack of a dedicated IP address also means you may not be able to use online shopping or banking effectively.
But if you live anywhere where ISP restrictions abound and media streaming may be restricted, then CactusVPN can be one of the solutions you really need to consider.