I often use it to monitor the speed while downloading or using internet and stumbled upon a website which takes time to respond — looking at the internet speed indicator tells me whether my internet is working properly or website is not using the bandwidth to load the page, in that case I simply reload the page to make it render properly.
I will be first to admit it that it is quiet easy to do it on windows Operating system, however you’ll be surprised to know that this can be done as easily on Ubuntu as well. In some cases you’ll feel that it’s better and quicker way to implement on Linux distros than on Windows – which involves downloading a software and installing them on your computer.
App and repository based Ubuntu distro makes it fun and easier to use. There sure is a learning curve for new users but, it is worth the effort.
I used Ubuntu 15.04 for this tutorial, but it can be implemented on any version of Ubuntu.
How to Install
Webupd8 designed a package which includes various useful applications in a single package such as radio, hotspot, themes and most importantly our Net speed indicator. We will be using this repository to install our net speed indicator to monitor internet speed.
Step 1.
Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and paste the following sudo command. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
Step 2
Update your repository. Sudo apt-get update
Step 3
Install netspeed indicator using this command. sudo apt-get install indicator-netspeed
Tips: You can also check the internet usage by all ports using a simple command “ifconfig”.
Today every tech savvy and DigitFreak reader are well aware of the fact that pretty much everything that we do on the internet is being logged or monitored. However, we are not frightened of these basic privacy threats because we Freak’s are good at cloaking our movements over the virtual world.
To prevent the online snooping and hide our identity on the internet, millions of people have signed up to a VPN service. Unfortunately, not all VPN services are as anonymous as they claim.
There are multiple methods to hide your identity over the internet, but using a VPN server is the cheapest service that can effectively make your presence almost untraceable on the internet. It should be noted that efficiency of a given method varies according to the service provider and the way you implement them.
I did explained it on the previous VPN review, but I will quote it again.
For example, if you are using a VPN service from Provider X and Provider Y – you may end up with different service quality and most importantly, the security of your identity over the internet. As mentioned earlier, not all service providers are honest and give you the total value for money.
Most of them do provide facilities from cheap data centers and often overload their servers. We also mentioned earlier that newer VPN service provider has faster servers and better services compared to some old and established companies. New companies have less crowded servers and latest technology to balance the traffic over their data centers.
How I found HideIPVPN:
I found an emerging VPN service provider (CactusVPN) few weeks ago, and had to keep looking for other services out their for DigitFreak readers.
You don’t need to be worried about any fraudulent websites, because we constantly test these websites and review their services so that you don’t end up being one of their victims.
While searching over the internet, one name that popped over and over again was — HideIPVPN. Since, we already spent some money to subscribe an annual plan on CactusVPN for my previous review, we couldn’t go for another subscription.
We went to their website and asked for a trial account to review their services on our website. This article not sponsored or requested by HideIPVPN, however they were happy to lend out 1 month free trial account for this review.
Plans and Pricing:
The company offers many exciting packages to choose from, which ranges from $5.99 to $11.95, if opted for monthly package. The subscription package can be little cheaper if you go for the annual subscription. They offer 1 Unlimited VPN Plan (which includes it all) with your choice of three term periods; 1, 6 or 12 months.
What does it include?
Unlimited Bandwidth, Uncapped Speed
Advance Easy-to-Use Software
Compatible w/ Phones & Tablets
New IP every time you connect
Provides a layer of security and anonymity
Protects you by hiding your real IP address
Secure connection between your PC and the Internet (128-2048bit)
Access sites restricted to US and UK residents
Anonymous Internet Surfing
Security for Hotspot Wireless Access Users
Unblock all VOIP Applications include Skype
Tip: Try HideIPVPN for 3 Days to see if it’s right for you. If you like it, upgrade to a longer term and save! If you find it’s not for you, you’re covered by their 3-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
You can go for any of the packages, based on your personal preference and why you want to get a VPN service in the first place. If you want to unblock websites based in US, you would go for “US VPN.” There are multiple countries you can choose from – Germany, UK, US and Canada can be subscribed individually, but NL or DE server subscription requires you to subscribe to one of the multi server package. Keep in mind, Most VPN providers support P2P on NL or DE servers only because it is illegal in both UK and US.
HideIPVPN has special package just for p2p transfers which allows P2P transfers over their network. This is the good thing, because most of the companies don’t specifies P2P support on their website. We at DigitFreak always support P2P community, so its quite obvious that we tend to bend towards this feature.
If you want to browse internet anonymously, but want to unblock websites as well — you don’t have to lookout for two different service providers for VPN and smart DNS service. You can simply opt for their combined package, which is designed for users like us.
Client Area:
Once you buy any of their VPN package, you’ll receive your account details by email. Login to your account with the email and password to access client area. The client area dashboard is neat and elegant, you can access useful contents and necessary links in one place.Please Note that Login details for client area and VPN service are different. To access VPN/Smart DNS service you must have a unique key to login. You can find these details in the client area.
Testing HideIPVPN software:
The easiest way to access their service is by their official software, which can be downloaded from their website for free. It is only available for Windows and Mac atm, for Linux you will have to configure the VPN service manually. When I installed the application on my computer, it felt very similar to CactusVPN (that we reviewed earlier) software. You can manage your Smart DNS and VPN service in one window.
There are two tabs for VPN and Smart DNS, which is used to manage or connect to the service you need to use. If you subscribed for VPN+Smart DNS package, you can use either of the service at a time. The account details are provided in the emails sent by the company, when you first registered on the website. You can also find these details in client area when you sign in to their official website.
Using HideIPVPN software is as simple as 1,2,3.
As is the case with other VPN service providers, HideIPVPN offers PPTP, SSTP, L2Tp/IPSec and OpenVPN security protocols. No surprises here, but what is outstanding to note is that it has gone ahead and implemented a new VPN protocol. However, they lack the latest military grade encryption – SoftEther, that is practically untraceable — which HideIPVPN promised to implement in near future.
There are also a handful of settings, which comes really handy while using the software to connect to the VPN servers. You can manage the startup behavior and connection settings on this tab, which governs the behavior of the software under these conditions.
The truly useful feature of the software is the new revolutionary App Killeroption, which is built into the application. You can add the software on this tab, which makes sure that the software included here are terminated when connection to VPN server drops due to some reason. The HideIPVPN application will terminate the software included in this list and restart them once reconnected to the server. This is really useful feature for those who take security very seriously.
Instead of the standard 40-80% customary drop in available ISP speed with other VPN companies, HideIPVPN was able to tap into almost 80-90% of the available ISP speed. Even we were surprised to find this was possible. This ensured that all streaming media could be viewed without trouble.
Smart DNS is relatively new technology which directs your requests to the proxy server, that is capable of unblocking any website regardless of your Geo-graphical position. Any user who is not currently located within a specific area which has been approved for viewing content available on these Geo-restricted websites will be automatically blocked from using the site freely and prevented from streaming/downloading the content available to permitted users.
This is a very nice feature, because there is negligible speed drop while using the SmartDNS feature provided by the company and you can still access all the region-restricted or blocked media/websites.
Speed Test:
People often ask, how fast is HideIPVPN? The simple answer is it’s fast enough for downloading, streaming videos, and playing online games. HideIPVPN customers give an average rating of 4 out of 5 on speed, which is a very acceptable score. While the speed may vary depending on many factors.
Your connection speed depends on several factors: which protocol you use, which data transport method you select, and your choice of DNS server.
We noticed below average speed drops while connected to the US servers, but UK, NL and DE servers performed quiet well.
Here are the speed test result from our location:
No VPN:
UK Server:
US Server:
NL Server:
DE Server:
uTorrent Speed Test:
Keep it in mind that VPN servers works very differently, as they have to encrypt your data before sending it back to you, which ends up to be a network congestion and throttle the connection speed a little.
In general, the closer you are to VPN server, the better bandwidth you get. As you know VPN connection only in theory is a direct connection between two computers. In reality data (encrypted) is send via many intermediary servers. For some connections less, for some more.
Customer Support:
We rarely had to contact HideIPVPN’s Support, but whenever we did, we always received quick and thorough responses to your questions or issues. A very satisfying experience.
However, HideIPVPN falls slightly behind the top VPN services in so much as it does not provide skype or telephone support for customers. Instead, customers can log in to the client area on the website and use the support ticketing system, live chat or email the company for support.
HideIPVPN currently offers Three Types of Support:
Email Support (Recommended) – We found email to best method to contact either their sales or technical team for support, because it’s much more organized, you can keep everything on record and their response time is usually within an hour or two. They can also address more complicated issues or questions in detail through email.
Live Chat – This is great if you have a quick question or concern about their service. However, their Live Chat is only available 12 hours a day.
1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold and for how long?
No do not keep any logs of users activity online. Our customers use shared IP so there is no way to assign specific activity to a single customer.
2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?
We operate under US jurisdiction and we would cooperate under US court order.
3. In the event you receive a DMCA take down notice or European equivalent, how are these handled?
I can not imagine why we would get DCMA in the first place as we do not host any content. Simply, there is nothing to take down.
4. Which payment systems do you operate and how are these linked to individual user accounts?
PayPal, credit card, PayPro, Google Wallet and Bitcoin
5. Do you support p2p protocol transfer? If no, why? If yes, how it can be accessed and what security mechanism you have in place to protect your customers?
Yes we do offer P2P and torrent support on NL and DE VPN servers. Depending on the server customers can use one of four different VPN protocols – PPTP, L2TP, OpenVPN and SSTP
It is also worth to mention that our VPN application has a very nice feature – “application killer”. It will shot down app if VPN connection is lost and once it is automatically re-established it will start it back on.
6. What steps are taken when a valid court order requires your company to identify an active user of your service?
If a court order would com in and if we would have sufficient data as to identify user (that is not possible if payment is mad via Bitcoin system) we would have no choice but to comply. But, as we said in point 1 and 2. As we operate under US jurisdiction we do not store any logs as we do not have to. So all we could say (in the worst case) is – Yes, Mr Smith is our customer – and nothing else.
7. What tools are used to monitor and mitigate abuse of your service?
We do not comment on such measures, reasons for this are obvious :-). However if service is abused we will know and account will be closed immediately.
If you want to use our service to stay private and anonymous online – feel free to come to us and we will do all we can to make it happen. Other than that we can not help you. And so that it is clear for everyone – paedophiles don’t even try!
8. What is the most secure VPN connection and encryption algorithm you would recommend to your users?
At this point SSTP, but OpenVPN and L2TP are not bad for a general but secure browsing as well.
9. Do you offer SoftEther protocol. Can you explain how a normal user can be benefited by this protocol and what it really means for end users when security and anonymity is concerned.
It is a military grade security protocol with AES 256-bit and RSA 4096-bit encryption. It is much harder to be detectable by ISP. It will be coming to HideIPVPN at some point in future.
Verdict:
So far we’ve discussed what makes HideIPVPN a great VPN service. However, like any product, HideIPVPN isn’t perfect. Though we found the support (by email, support ticket or live chat) helpful and reasonably efficient, adding live telephone support would make life a lot easier, and result in faster turnover of inquiries.
HideIPVPN offers a 3 days money back guarantee so you can test their full service, and ask for cancellation if not satisfied within the given time frame. They also offer 24 hours trial on VPN services and 7 days trial for SmartDNS. If you are in the market for an affordable, reliable personal VPN with timely support, you should definitely consider HideIPVPN.
HideIPVPN is easy to install and use. The speed is excellent. The pricing concerns us a little, as other VPN providers usually offers their service at standard price of $6.99 or less, but HideIPVPN’s premium service comes at $11.95/month. However, good service always comes at a price – HideIPVPN is p2p friendly and keeps user data secure, they even got a dedicated package just for p2p transfers. Many other VPN providers in this day and age have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to that type of filesharing.
The main negatives to the service are that it is difficult to get a refund for anything other than defective software, while there are currently no servers outside of Europe and North America, and even in those areas, only five countries in total have servers.
We recommend HideIPVPN if your sole purpose is to protect yourself from snoopers, surf blocked websites and stream videos anonymously over your network.
Riding on one wheel cycle or “Unicycle” seems to be fun? If your answer is yes, then you would love the new Ryno! What we just named an animal? Oh com’on, we are not that dumb enough. I am actually talking about the new single-wheel electric scooter, which can break all the barrieres.
RYNO motors – is a single-wheeled electric scooter is self-balancing, which offer 0 (zero) turning radius and only takes up about as much space as a folding bicycle. Now, How cool is that?
This is obviously not something new, because the company released it’s first model back in 2013. Have a look at the specs.
However, it only has a maximum range of 20 miles between charges, a top speed that is limited to 12.5 mph (the actual top speed of 25 mph is limited to keep the RYNO scooter within the more relaxed legal boundaries of “personal mobility scooters”), and it looks like it fell out of a Japanese anime — yes, for some people, that last point is as much a con as it is a pro.
Have a look at the video and you can decide by yourself.
Have you ever faced a situation when you are streaming/downloading your favorite TV Episode or Movie from the internet at the maximum speed provided by your ISP, but you cannot enjoy your Facebook Streams, tweeter buzz or other website’s because your internet connection’s max ISP speed limit won’t let you or, you just found out that your limited internet bandwidth provided by your ISP has been exhausted by one of your application? Not anymore!
You can now simply limit the internet Download and upload speed/traffic of any application on your system with the help of a simple tool. NetLimiter is the ultimate bandwidth shaper, which can control your internet traffic and monitor the real-time bandwidth usage.
The interface is simple and effective, where you can monitor the internet usage by all the applications installed on your system. It helps you find out the software, which is responsible for hogging the bandwidth and leaving you with the exhausted data on your account.
You can limit the maximum upload and download speed, which can be used by the particular software or process on your computer and hence, makes it easier to manage the distribution of the bandwidth of your monthly data cap.
The “NetLimiter” can be a real relief for the limited data users, who wants to control the usage of internet bandwidth according to their preference. It can allow them to restrict the internet access only to the handful of apps.
The effective Bandwidth shaper, network monitor, connection blocker and filters, traffic charts and informative statistics can be used to control the every bit of internet bandwidth which can be used on your computer.
Firefox 13 is out now! You can download the latest version of Firefox web browser from their official website, which will bring the most anticipated improvements and features to enhance your experience.
Finally, Firefox 13 brings some visual improvements and features to the browser. If you have already upgraded to the newest version, you will immediately notice the – new sleek start page with “common settings” shortcuts.
You can find the speed dial in the “new tab”, where you can keep your most frequently visited web pages in a tile, to get zippy access to them.
Then there comes some internal CSS and script optimization which makes the browser more stable and ready for the future web.
Firefox can now prove to be good asset for those, who uses greater number of multiple tabs in the single session. Also When loading a previous session’s tabs, Firefox will not load each tabs contents in the background, but only when you ‘switched’ to it. This is aimed at speeding up browser performance for users of tab-heavy sessions.
Firefox has improved their “In page Element Inspector“, which now included “inspect elements” feature. It is found that the default element inspector works flawlessly, which may get some attention of web page developers – who prefer to use chrome to do the similar work.
![HideIPVPN provides free US and UK vpn, but how good are their paid services? [In-depth Review]](https://digitfreak.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/z_00049.jpg.webp)
If you want to browse internet anonymously, but want to unblock websites as well — you don’t have to lookout for two different service providers for 
Please Note that Login details for client area and VPN service are different. To access VPN/Smart DNS service you must have a unique key to login. You can find these details in the client area.
RYNO motors – is a single-wheeled electric scooter is self-balancing, which offer 0 (zero) turning radius and only takes up about as much space as a folding bicycle. Now, How cool is that?
You can limit the maximum upload and download speed, which can be used by the particular software or process on your computer and hence, makes it easier to manage the distribution of the bandwidth of your monthly data cap.
