Transcription
How to Get and Use a VPN
Hey everyone. In today's video, I want to show you how to get and use a VPN. And if you don't know anything about a VPN, I'll tell you some of the benefits of a VPN. I want to focus on two different ones here. One is paid and one has a free option with paid upgrades. The free ones do limit your speed.
So I kept that a little bit smaller in this video and focused on the paid ones. It's my favorite one by far, but I'll link to both in the description. You could try the free one. And see if the speed is a problem, I'll show you how to check your speed too. But, what is a VPN? So if you think of any device that's connected to the internet, your phone, your laptop, they all have an IP address.
That's a sequence of numbers. A VPN will mask that IP address. So an IP address identifies your device and the location. A VPN basically erases that from being able to be identified, that's probably the biggest benefit of a VPN. The second benefit is that it will encrypt your data. Let's say you're at a public airport and you're using your wifi to do a transaction with your bank account.
Anybody that has that ability at that airport could basically hack into your device there because you're not using a VPN and it's not fully protected. Yes. There is a password for your WIFI or your mobile hotspot, but advanced hackers could go and bypass that. A VPN will scripture data, so when you send the data,
instead of going from one device to another device, it goes through the VPN, gets encrypted, and then it gets decrypted later. It's basically a way to really keep your data even more secure than it already is. And the third benefit of a VPN is that it basically keeps your activities, whatever you're doing online, private by using a VPN, none of that is tracked. A lot of the VPN providers make that a priority to let you know,
they're not tracking your activities online. So if that is important to you, that is the big benefit of the VPN, the privacy that you get by using a VPN and the big downside to it is, and this is very true with the free ones, but they do reduce your speed because they do create and another path for your data to travel to get encrypted and decrypted.
So that extra security that comes with a VPN, that extra privacy does slow down the speed. Where the data has to travel from one location to another on the internet, but the paid ones really reduced that. So the speed is not very significant, and you may not even notice it, but I'll show you in this video, how to do a speed test to make sure that it's not a big deal.
So let's jump in here. I want to focus on the two different VPNs that I mentioned to you. The paid one and the free one. I'm going to leave a link in the description to both. We're going to basically install it, pay for it, and use it on our computer and our mobile device. I want to show you the entire process, so there's no confusion.
And you could always ask questions in the comments section below, but let's jump into the computer right now. I'll start with showing you my two favorite VPN providers and I'll have the link in the description to both of these. So you could check them out. In this video, I'm going to focus on this one.
It's by far the most popular one. And it's the one I'm going to be using, but I'll link to a different one because this one does have a free option. And I'll talk about the downside of free options. But this one is the only one with a free option that I like. The other ones severely reduce your speed. This does a little bit, but not as much as the other free ones.
So we'll start with this one. Again, link in the description Nord VPN. And you could go ahead and check out the pricing for this one, but this is the one I'm going to download, and why I really like it because they have an app for just about every single device that you want to use on. So you could just do the monthly plan just to see if you like it.
And they also have this option right here, tutorials, which basically show you on any single device, where to go and how to download it. So if you wanted to get this for iOS, there's an application for it. It tells you how to find an application and walks you through it. In this video, I'm going to do exactly this on desktop and mobile, but I'm going to only focus on desktop Mac and iOS, but this has it for every single device.
And it's pretty much the same process, but you can press their application and see how that works. On proton VPN. The reason why I wanted to include it in this video, because if you go onto the pricing tab, they do give you a free option, which most VPN does not have free option, but this one basically lets you do a yearly plan.
So for less than a hundred dollars a year, you could get that option or you could try the free one. Here's the limitation with the free one it's limited to three countries. Only one device and it does reduce your speed pretty significantly. So that's why I think the paid options for any VPN are your best bet.
But if you just want to see how VPNs work, you could go ahead and test this out and I'll make a separate video about installing Proton VPN. But right now let's go ahead and get Nord VPN. So you'll just basically click the link below, come to this website and then go ahead and sign up for it. I'll just go ahead and do the one-month plan here.
And then just go through, create an account. And if you think you're going to use VPN more long-term, this is probably your best bet to do a yearly plan. So I'm going to go ahead, create an account and they have a lot of payment options here. So choose the payment option that best fits you. They even have crypto.
Bunch of different ones like Bitcoin here. And then once you fill all this out, just press continue. Alright. Once you typing your payment information, you're going to get a password and activate the account link on your email that you provided. So I'm going to go ahead and press that. Go ahead and type your password.
I already did that. So I'm going to go ahead and log into my account here. And it should take you to this download tab and it's gonna scan and find out what computer you're on. So if you're on a PC, it's going to be a different link. In the case of being on a Mac over here. But you'll see all the different apps and extensions right underneath.
So depending on what you have, Android, TV, iOS, whatever you want, there's going to be an app for that. I'm going to show you the iOS app a little bit later, but let's go ahead and download the Mac app here. It's going to launch the app store here for me. So I'm going to go ahead and say, okay. And I'm going to download the app.
Let me show you one more thing here that is an extremely useful resource when you're comparing VPNs. So the two different ones that I showed you, Nord VPN and Proton VPN. If you install a plugin called similar to web or go to similarweb.com, you could type in that domain name, the name of the website, and you could see how popular a website is.
As you could see, this one has 11 million monthly visitors. Nord VPN and proton VPN have about 2 million. And you could see that some of the traffic is coming from China and India and Nord VPN, a lot of the traffic is coming from North America a little bit from India, about 3%. So you could compare different websites, especially service providers, like VPN providers.
I like to see what countries using them and how popular they are, how many people are using them. And that's a great way to find out and you could see over time if they're getting more popular. So this one's about 12 million views a month. So 12 million visitors are coming here every month to check out Nord VPN, making it one of the best VPNs out there as far as traffic goes.
And you could decide if it's a good fit for you once you take it for a test drive. So inside of the app here, the first thing we want to do is we want to sign up or log in. We already sign up on the website. So we're going to log in with our username and password. So click log in here. And once you log in, you could connect now or pick a country.
So you could pick a country I'm in the U.S. Here. So I could choose the country or I could press quick-connect. You could see all these different servers that are available here, and you could choose any of them here you want. There's one in all these different countries. So if I wanted to watch BBC and I want it to be in the UK to do that from that server, I could do that.
Let me do a quick connect here on top and I'll press got it here. And I'll allow this configuration and just like that right here. You see now protected. Now that means VPN is turned on and I'm in the U.S. It connected automatically to that, but you could choose your country here on the side. You could also press this settings option to see all these different options that are available.
So auto-launch, for example, you could turn on. AutoConnect you could turn on and VPN protocol by default is here, but if you know more about it, there are a couple of other options here. This one works just fine. So now I could see that I'm on the US server. If I zoom out, I could see the other servers that are available for me.
So if I want to come to Asia or if I want to go to Europe to see, I could simply click on one and then connect to it that way you see connecting right now to this different server in a different country. So now if I go to Google. So now let me switch country, let me find out if I could connect to Japan or click that.
And you see on top, is this connecting to Japan. And as soon as I'm connected, I'm going to get a notification and I could browse the internet here from this Japanese server. So I just changed my connection to Hong Kong here on the side. I just chose Hong Kong and now I'm connected and it's protected. So now let me go online here to speedtest.net.
And you could see I'm connected with a whole different IP address now, instead of the one I had before now, I could press go. And I should get a whole different speed here. And it's a good speed for the server I'm connecting to across the world here in Hong Kong. So I'm really happy with this download speed, but the upload speed is significantly slower compared to the download speed.
And if I jump into Google type in VPN, you could see the results are in a different language. Everything is totally different here. And I would give it a second every time I connect here to a different server. I would just give it a couple of minutes for it to connect fully. Then my search results are that way.
I noticed sometimes when I was jumping around between different countries and I was doing a Google search, it was still sticking to the older country instead of switching me to that location. But now your information is secure. Let's jump into the iOS device on my iPhone here. I'll show you the exact same process. It's super easy.
So it'll just take a minute. So on a mobile device, I'm going to jump into the app store here on my iPhone, and I want to get an app that's basically gonna set up the whole installation for me. So again, I'm going to go here and search for Nord VPN. And this is the one I want right here. I'm going to get this app right here and I'm not connected right now.
So. Again, I need to log in or sign up. The signing up option will send me to a place where I need to sign up to get started. But since I already have a login that I did on a computer, I'm going to go ahead and just log in using my email and password. And that was the first step, the log-in process. Now I could do a quick connect for it, to do his job for me.
And it just by default connected to the United States. And the nearest server to me. And now you have your browse country option underneath where you could go ahead and switch your country. Or right now I'm connected right here. As you could see on top connected to the U.S. VPN server on this page, I have a setting gear right on the top, so I'll press that.
And here you could see that you're logged in. You could log out here. You could change your VPN protocol. The default one is fine. And you could turn on auto-connect here where it lets you auto-connect every time you log in here. And now let me show you what changed inside of the setting of your phone.
If you go to the settings app here. And let me go back to the homepage of settings, but you could see that the VPN option is turned on. You could just go ahead and turn it off right here. So you see that switch on-off just like that. I could turn my VPN on and off. Let's dive deeper here, go to general. And there's a VPN option here.
Click VPN. And you could see your connector so you could disconnect it here, but on iOS 13, it does give you that option right inside of the settings app on the homepage. But if I click I here, I could read more detail about the type of server account of my VPN, and I could delete the VPN right over here.
And that's all it takes to turn on VPN on your mobile device. Well, I know that was a lot to cover in this video, but VPN is a powerful tool. And luckily, because of it, these new apps, make it really easy for everybody to use without really much coding or really diving in. The visual representation just lets you turn a VPN on and off whenever you need it.
So I hope you found this video useful again. Please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel for easy-to-follow social media and tech videos like this one. And I'll catch you next time. Thanks for watching.