Five Best VPN Service Providers

Whether you're killing time at your favorite coffee shop or you're traveling for work and don't want your data falling into the wrong hands, you need a VPN to keep your traffic encrypted and secure. Even so, which VPN service is the best, and which offers the best combination of reliability, features, security, and affordability? We asked you, and this week we're going to look at the top five VPN service providers based on your nominations.

Earlier in the week, we asked you which VPN service providers you thought were the best. You responded, we tallied your nominations, and now we're back to highlight the top five.

BolehVPN earned praise from many of you thanks to its truly personal touch. You interact directly with the people behind the scenes there, they take feedback and suggestions seriously, and openly work to improve their services. They also offer completely proxied servers, so you can choose to route all of your traffic through them, or just some of your traffic if you choose. All of the basics of a good VPN are there too—anonymous surfing, masked IP addresses, and encryption of all your internet traffic. You can check out BolehVPN's pricing and plans here.

Astrill VPN offers simple setup, one-click activation, and low prices. If you're in the market for a new router, they even sell routers pre-configured with Astrill VPN so you don't need an additional client to protect your data. Astrill supports Mac OS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, and sports servers in 17 countries that you can select from, all ready to anonymize your traffic and keep it encrypted while you work or travel. You can see all of Astrill VPN's pricing and plans here.

Hamachi is one of our favorite VPN tools. We've shown you how to secure yourself on public networks with it, and then shown you how to roll your own VPN for gaming, multimedia, and security with it. You have the option to subscribe to Hamachi's managed plan, but it's just as easy to pick up their free client and use that as a VPN when you travel. Since it's so easy to set up, and you can route traffic back through your home internet connection or encrypt it, it's a perfect solution for DIYers.

Private Internet Access (appropriately named) supports a surprising number of devices, sports servers in dozens of countries and allows you to choose among them, and even better, doesn't log your activity so you can be completely anonymous and encrypted if you need to be. Sure, the service has everything a good VPN has—encryption, easy-to-install and use clients, and decent prices, but their commitment to anonymity earned high praise from those of you that use the service. You can check out all of Private Internet Access' pricing and plans here.

Even though Witopia won our poll last time, and despite sending their customers here to vote for them (friendly reminder that votes emailed to us will not and first-time commenters may not be counted), they made the top five with fair votes. Plus, it's up against stiff competition this time. The service still offers some of the world's best and most robust VPN services though, with a massive network you'll never have trouble connecting to, 24x7x365 customer support, support for just about every transport protocol you could possibly need to use, and an easy-to-use client. Witopia even supports Android and iOS, Chromebooks, and more. Need secure DNS? They've got that too. You can read up on Witopia's pricing and plans here.

Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all-out vote to determine the best.

The honorable mention this week goes out to BoxVPN, which many of you praised for its international support and low prices. Also noteworthy is AirVPN, specifically for its high-level data encryption, compliance with data security best practices (which means even they don't know what you're doing), complete and total net neutrality, and the fact that you can pay with bitcoin, if you wish.