Hotspot Shield

This service is built to move bulk data, and it does that better than the category generally manages. A large download finishes in a fraction of the time most protected connections take, on a network reaching more than eighty countries, with obfuscation and a route through Tor included rather than sold on top. If what you want is to shift a lot of traffic through a tunnel, the engineering is pointed directly at it.

The reason it is worth understanding is who else sells it. Its owner supplies the same underlying network to security companies that market their own VPNs as independent choices, each with its own applications and its own privacy policy stacked in front of the identical servers. Somebody comparing those products on privacy is comparing the policies, not the tunnels carrying their traffic.

The cost is everything that is not bulk transfer. The delay before a response begins is among the worst measured anywhere, so calls stutter and ordinary pages feel heavier than they did unprotected. Testing found the kill switch letting unencrypted traffic past during a crash, no outside assessment of the service could be located, and signing up requires both an email address and a payment method that identifies you.