In Collaboration With NordVPN
A VPN (or a Virtual Private Network) offers two main benefits, security and privacy. You can hide your IP address and location to prevent others, including your ISP provider, from tracking you. While such software helps to protect your personal information and data that is being transferred through the network, these aren’t the only features that VPN companies offer.
Bypass geo-blocked restrictions
Due to copyright, licensing, or government restrictions, some companies limit the access to their content to certain users based on their locations and IPs. That’s why you can sometimes see the message “The content isn’t available in your region” on your screen.
This is largely prevalent in the video and streaming industry, but it is also used to restrict access to social media sites or newspapers. If you wish to bypass these restrictions, a VPN can be handy.
Access all streaming service catalogues
When it comes to streaming, access generally boils down to copyright and licensing problems. For instance, Netflix and other popular streaming platforms like Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu or HBO Now have a separate set of libraries for every country. Therefore, many TV shows and movies available in America, for instance, are not available in Hong Kong.
VPN services can unblock catalogs available in different regions by hiding your IP. Therefore, if you connect to a VPN server located in London, you can access content that is only available for British netizens, and so on with other locations and catalogs.
A VPN provider can also unlock live stream and video on-demand services available in Europe and America. For instance, if you’re in Hong Kong and want to connect to BBC iPlayer, RaiPlay or MyTF1 because you miss local news, such a tool will be useful.
Access apps from everywhere
As you probably know, you cannot use Google, YouTube, Facebook, or WhatsApp in Mainland China (but there are actually many more restrictions) and TikTok in Hong Kong due to government regulations, and the only way to get around this, is to use a VPN.
It can change your IP address to make the content provider think that you are browsing from some other region or location that does offer access. You can browse unrestricted.
Get better flight tickets or hotel rates
Planning your holidays requires a lot of time and effort in comparing offers available on the Internet. Indeed, most travelers head to flight ticket and hotel comparison platforms to find the cheapest prices available.
Airlines and hotels use dynamic pricing structures. They consider your location and search history, trends as in demand-based pricing, and more to come up with individualized offers. Thus, prices may vary from one customer to the other. But this can be avoided with a VPN.
As it hides your location and other online activities (no logs are stored), prices remain constant, irrespective of your location. In fact, by using a VPN you can secure significant discounts when you book cheap air flights or hotels.
Makes your connection secure and stable
Secure your connections on public networks
The primary reason to use a VPN is greater online privacy by having a private network and encrypted connection to surf the web. So, you can keep your passwords, personal details, and data safe when you are using a public network or Wi-Fi, for instance.
Usually, when you find a public Wi-Fi network at the airport or at the coffee shop, you connect to it without a second thought but they are generally not that secure and malicious people might take advantage of that to hack some personal data.
As you connect to the same public Wi-Fi using a reliable VPN, your connection will be secured and encrypted, which will guarantee anonymous browsing and perfect privacy.
Avoid bandwidth throttling
An Internet Service Provider (ISP) can intentionally slow down (or speed up) a connection to regulate a network, which is called “bandwidth throttling”. The goal is to keep any single device from using too much of the bandwidth.
As it encrypts your data and hides your online activity from the ISP, a VPN can help prevent bandwidth throttling since your ISP will be unable to block your device from bandwidth-heavy activities like downloading or streaming your favourite TV shows.
How to get started?
In Hong Kong, NordVPN is one of the best VPNs as it costs less than $HK 40 per month for a yearly plan, and it comes with DNS leak protection, a double 2048-bit encryption, two kill switches, and many other features. The virtual network offers both security and speed. The VPN provider has a strict no-log policy. It has more than 5400 VPN servers in 59 countries, including 70 in Hong Kong and 120 in Taiwan.
At the moment, NordVPN proposes a Summer Deal : For 2-year plans, get 3 months for free and benefit from a 72% discount. Total, a monthly plan will cost $US 3.30 (~ $HK 25).
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