A virtual private network. A VPN is used to transfer data securely between devices and to encrypt an internet connection.

When you go online directly, the owners of the sites you visit receive information about you. They know which country and which device you came from and which operating system you are running.

With a VPN you do not reach the site directly: first you connect to the VPN provider's server. The VPN encrypts your connection, so the owner of the destination site never learns your real details. Neither does anyone else.

If you open your favourite torrent tracker and see "Access restricted", a VPN will help.

If you are always travelling and go online from an airport, a café or a shopping centre, you need a VPN — a device on a public network is easy to break into.

If you want to watch your favourite series on Netflix or a live broadcast of the Oscars, you will not manage without a VPN either.

But if you only use your home or corporate network, do not visit blocked sites, have no taste for piracy and trust your internet provider and your government, a VPN is unlikely to be of much use to you.

Yes. In Russia there is no ban on using VPN services, even if you intend to use one to reach sites blocked by Roskomnadzor. What is illegal is using a VPN for criminal purposes — selling drugs through Telegram, for example.

It depends on what you need it for. To watch a new season on the HBO site, look for a service with a server in the United States. To download torrents, you need a VPN that supports the BitTorrent protocol.

These are the technologies that encrypt the connection. Depending on what you need a VPN service for, one protocol will suit you better and another may not suit you at all.

PPTP, for example, is supported even by very old versions of operating systems, but it is not secure enough. OpenVPN is considered the safest, but it runs more slowly than the others, because a high level of security eats up a lot of resources.

VPN services do not have so many features that you could get lost in them. Usually it is enough to pick the country your connection will go through and press the start button.

Services differ in detail, but they all work in much the same way.

We want to help you choose a VPN service that fits your budget and your needs and fully covers what you want to do. You can use the independent user rating or our VPN selection by parameters.

Nothing here is sold or advertised.

You do not download anything from our site. Every link leads to the provider's official site, and that is where you download and install the VPN client.

We do not add unreliable or suspicious providers. Every service on AllVPN is checked and selected by hand.

There are no completely free VPNs on the site: they run more slowly, drop out and may not be reliable enough. But some providers offer a free trial of their service, usually between 3 and 30 days.

To find a service with a free version, open the VPN selection by parameters and tick "Free".

We use two systems:

The user rating is the arithmetic mean of the scores left by visitors. Each user can score a service only once — that is how we protect the rating from being gamed.

Automatic ratings — by price and by the number of servers and countries.

We work with providers through affiliate programmes. If you find a suitable VPN service through our site and pay for a subscription, we receive a commission. That is why we ask visitors to go to providers' sites from AllVPN — it is what keeps the project going.

It makes no difference to the price you pay — visit any of those sites separately and see for yourself.