WiTopia VPN Service Review

Filed Under Networking, Security at 25th May 2011 0:01 by

I have always wanted to get a VPN server running at home so that I can tunnel back into the network remotely and also to protect myself on public hot spots. The former was more complicated than I thought and the solution I tried (OpenVPN) is not supported all my devices compared to PPTP or L2TP/IPSec so I went with the latter solution for the mean time.

Using Life Hacker’s High Five article on the five most popular VPN service providers. I went through the list and found WiTopia offered the cheapest service with a variety of gateways available. Inadvertently, I found the follow up article on Life Hacker to confirm WiTopia is the chosen VPN service out of the five popular ones.

WiTopia’s Wiki page was very useful resource in setting all my devices from my MacBook Pro to my Android phone. All the instructions were up to date and easy to follow. There is a list of gateways to choose from which is again listed on their Wiki page and linked during their set up instructions.

I have it setup on my Android powered phone to my desktop machine. Whilst each purchase you can have one concurrent connection, one is all that I need so far and enable it whenever I need it. A quirk I found with the VPN is that it does not stay connected 24/7. On my phone it drops after certain amount of time but never whilst I was actively using it. This also happens on my Desktop. The problem is you don’t know if the VPN has disconnected or not unless you actively look at the connection.

When I go abroad I shall post an update on how it works out of my country of origin.

WiTopia
WiTopia Wiki
Five Best VPN Service Providers
Best VPN Service Provider: WiTopia

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Networking, Security and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to WiTopia VPN Service Review

  1. James says:
    23 July 2012 at 23:02

    Nice writeup so what is the final verdict on Witopia?
    The disconnection issue you mention is unfortunately common with all providers as it’s more of an OS software issue. There should be a way to only route traffic by PPTP or TAP otherwise as you say if the connection drops you may not know which defeats the purpose of the VPN.

    Reply
    • Danny says:
      24 July 2012 at 9:23

      It’s a good service and I didn’t have any issues with the service itself. The limitations as you said seems to be with the device itself or the hotspots/ISP restricting VPN access.

      I would recommend WiTopia.

      Reply

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