Explore the cyber world without any boundaries and get access to every website on the internet. Unblock any website irrespective of the country you are currently residing in. And, don't worry, your real IP is completely hidden from intruders and third-parties, all they can see is a hide.me IP. Not even your ISP can trace anything back to you. So, what are you waiting for? Go and enjoy the ride!
It showed my mother and I smiling with a man who looked like me; on the back, strange symbols had been scribbled with black ink. I peeked out the empty window into the gloomy woods: whoever had thrown in through the window was long gone. I found myself staring at the picture for a long time, wondering if it was some kind of evil magic that kept me from tearing my eyes away.
Fog had rolled in with the cool night air, turning the woods into a sea of white. We hardly ever left the cabin, and the overgrown dirt track that led away from it was difficult to navigate at the best of times. My mother drove white-knuckled, gritting her teeth at each pothole and scraping bush. To me, their thorns sounded like the claws of the demon.
So far in 2023, 13 million people from 200-plus countries around the world have benefitted from the Hymnary website! Thank you to all who use Hymnary.org and all who support it with gifts of time, talent and treasure. If you feel moved to support our work today with a gift of any amount and a word of encouragement, we would be grateful. You can donate online at our secure giving site. Or, if you'd like to make a gift by check, please send it to: Hymnary.org, Calvin University, 3201 Burton Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546. May the hope, love, joy and peace of Advent be yours this day and always.
Please give today to support Hymnary.org. We served 1.3 million users last month, making this the most complete and popular database on the planet. Hymnary.org would not survive without the support of many generous people, and your donations allow us to continue to improve the site, add hymnals and much, much more.
On the left sidebar you have additional tabs for Locations, Map, and Features, as well as Your Account, and Support. The Locations tab displays a searchable list of all available Hide.me server locations with especially fast 10G servers tagged with an icon next to the server name. Along the top you can filter through all servers, those optimized for streaming, or Multi Hop servers as well. For those who are more spatially inclined, the Map tab displays the physical location of all of these servers on a world map instead.
Hide.me is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS, as well as some consoles and smart TVs. There are also browser add-ons for Chrome and Firefox that come with support for the SOCKS proxy.
Now known as eVenture Ltd., hide.me was founded in 2012 by former Forbes-profiled entrepreneur Sebastian Schaub. The company is based out of Malaysia and currently only has one product, hide.me VPN. The VPN offers solid features including 10 simultaneous connections, split tunneling, multihop and peer-to-peer support for gaming and torrenting. It scored well on our list of best VPN services.
With a rock-solid focus on privacy, hide.me is an excellent VPN. During our test, its decent speeds and industry-standard features made it an easy-to-use, consistent experience overall. While its speeds are middling, and its pricing is a bit steep, we also think those negatives are vastly outweighed by its positives.
Maybe. China is notorious for its aggressive anti-VPN stance, blocking most major VPN providers. And hide.me is no exception, though it offers a guide on how you might be able to get its VPN to work in China.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
As with most VPN companies, Hide.me offers longer subscriptions at a discount. A one-year plan with Hide.me will run you $59.95, and a two-year plan costs $99.95. NordVPN costs a mere $83.88 per year, ProtonVPN's Plus tier costs $96.00 per year, and TunnelBear's ($120 for Three-Year Plan at TunnelBear) excellent service costs slightly less at $59.88 per year. In general, I advise customers to purchase short-term plans first, then try out the VPN service for a while before committing to a long-term plan. That way, you can be sure the VPN will work for all the services you use most frequently.
The number of servers and the location of a VPN company's servers can have a noticeable impact on performance. Companies with only a handful of servers must funnel more customers into crowded servers, reducing the sliver of the bandwidth pie available to each person. Similarly, if a company only has a few locations for its servers, it can mean connecting to an entirely different continent just to get online. For that reason, we pay careful attention to how many servers are offered, and whether there's a good degree of geographic diversity in those servers' placement.
Hide.me has a reasonably sized pool of servers, with 1,400 servers in 56 different locations across 35 countries. For comparison, NordVPN has over 5,200 servers and CyberGhost offers in excess of 5,600 servers. Private Internet Access, ExpressVPN, and TorGuard all have over 3,000 servers, respectively. Keep in mind that companies will purchase as many servers as necessary to meet demand, so it's not a strict measurement of quality.
A big reason to use a VPN is to protect your privacy online, which is why it's important to know if the VPN itself is violating your privacy. While I cannot peer within the hearts of company employees or their servers, I can ask questions of company representatives and read through a VPN company's privacy policy.
Hide.me's privacy policy is very thorough and very long, especially compared with TorGuard's impressively brief policy. It does, however, lay out what data the company gathers, how it goes about gathering it, and what that data is used for. The effort is laudable, but I would like to see a bit more plain English.
Part of why you don't want a VPN storing a lot of information about you and your activities is that the company could be compelled to hand over that information to law enforcement. Hide.me explains the company's stance this way: "If a court order is received from a recognized legal authority with jurisdiction over hide.me then the company shall comply with that order. However, the company cannot be compelled to hand over information which it does not have."
If you're particularly concerned about receiving a DMCA notice for, say, downloading copyrighted content, Hide.me has a ready response: "Since we store no connection logs, we cannot associate the notice with a customer identity even if legally compelled to do so."
The Hide.me app is very simple, offering just a blue window with a big button to connect the VPN. I appreciate apps that cut to the chase like this. It's much more straightforward than PureVPN, which has some useful scenario-based connection presets, but lacks a fast and easy way to get online.
The Hide.me app is simple, but it's not exactly friendly. I much prefer NordVPN's app, which uses maps and large buttons to make even complex tools approachable. TunnelBear does something similar with brightly colored bears.
One quirk I did notice in testing was that when the "Best Location" option was selected, the Hide.me app sometimes connected me to a VPN server in the Netherlands. Now, I have nothing against the Netherlands, but most VPNs will connect you to the nearest server to your actual location by default. That's because the closer you are to the VPN server, the better performance you're likely to see. Also disappointing is how the client tried and failed several times to connect me with a US-based VPN server. I'm surprised that after all the work Hide.me has done to improve its client, this behavior persists.
The Settings panel does provide some surprisingly advanced features, however. Hide.me even lets you trigger custom scripts for when the VPN fails, which I have never seen before. An Advanced tab lets you mess around with ports and such, if that's your thing. The client also includes a rare feature called Split Tunneling, which lets you designate which apps send traffic through the VPN and which do not. This is handy for negotiating tricky scenarios, like streaming to local media devices or accessing specific services that block VPN traffic.
You can select the VPN protocol you want Hide.me to use, and OpenVPN is an option. By default, Hide.me uses IKEv2, so changing this might be worthwhile. You can also set up a Fallback configuration. If the VPN can't connect with your first choice of protocols, it will try again with the protocols you select.
During my testing, I wasn't able to access Netflix when connected to a domestic Hide.me server. Your mileage may vary, but keep in mind that a VPN service that works with Netflix today might not tomorrow.
A major concern among PCMag's readers is the impact using a VPN will have on their internet speeds. That's a valid concern, because using a VPN forces your web traffic to jump through more hoops and travel farther than usual. To get a sense of the impact from each service, I use the Ookla internet speed test tool to compare test results with and without the VPN. (Note that Ookla and Encrypt.me are owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns PCMag.)
Alternatively, you can follow Hide.me's instructions on how to run a VPN from your router, or purchase a Vilfo router configured to run with Hide.me. While an interesting setup, I don't think that using a VPN through a router is a viable use case.
Hide.me says it will comply with court orders received by recognized legal authorities with jurisdiction over them. But again, that's to be expected, and if the logs don't show anything significant, that won't matter at all.
Connection times were good in most cases, with WireGuard getting us online in 1-2 seconds. The app doesn't appear to have a connection timeout, though, and a couple of times we found it hung on its 'Initializing service connection...' animation for minutes.
aa06259810