The Importance of Using a VPN: A Personal Experience with Astral

So I decided to try out Astral's VPN service, and I have to say it was absolutely unacceptable at first. I had been using a different VPN service for a while, and when I needed to get a refund from them, I thought I would give Astral a shot. However, when I tried to connect to one of their servers near me, I found that the connection was not as reliable as I expected.

Let's go ahead and try connecting to New York instead, because we want to see how the connection across the country is. We'll do a speed test here in New York and it's going to show a different location now you can see now we have a different well it still says 209 the rest of the numbers are different you just have to trust me on that but we are connected to New York you can see the geo location now shows that that's where we are.

So, let's go ahead and do a speed test in New York. Once again, the Ping is sitting just over 100 millisecond ping connection speed is looking fantastic here at 235 megabits per second, which is very very very acceptable. The uplink as you can see is hardly affected, I mean I wouldn't call that affected at all from the San Francisco test.

So for the last test, we're going to go ahead and connect to Los Angeles, so we'll be connecting to a nearby VPN doing a speed test at a nearby by uh location. So let's go ahead and see how well this works. Once again you can see the IP change, so now you're seeing the benefits of a VPN.

Now obviously our speeds are very very similar to the San Francisco connection but look at this, look at the Ping this is what matters if you're gaming on a VPN this ping is pretty damn good it was what only 4 milliseconds higher than without the VPN and the upload is again fairly unaffected. So you guys can see now why VPN's with fast services are important and uh everybody needs one trust me.

So, I took Barnicle's suggestion and tried out Astral's service, and I have to say it is by far the fastest service I've tried out yet. Now I've tried out quite a few others IP Vanish Cyber Ghost Um Private Internet Access The Viper and just to name a few, and this was by far the fastest consistently I've been using this for several days now, I haven't noticed any random disconnects or slowdowns or no problems connecting to any servers Skype calls no problem whatsoever.

So, one of the cool things about VPN services is that you don't have to run them on a client level. If you have a router that will actually allow you to plug in VPN information, or if you have a router that's flashable to something like DDWRT which is a custom firmware then you can plug in the VPN information into the router where any traffic going through the router is then tunneled through that VPN.

However, it takes a little bit longer and a little bit more time to change the VPN. You have to log into your router and change it reboot your router and all that stuff. But then again if you have a lot of machines that you want to worry about actually connecting to the internet and hiding your IP then you can go ahead and do it at a router level.

Overall, using a VPN like Astral is smart and it's worth doing so for six bucks a month or something silly like that if you buy a year you get an even better discount. Protecting your information is stupid not to do. So if you're using a VPN service why don't you help each other out by telling everybody what service you have, tell everybody what your encrypted VP download speed and upload speed are and then what your encrypted download speed and upload speed is.

So, there's six of us still watching this video, so I love you guys. To the rest of you well you're not going to hear this anyway but I will see you guys in the next video of course.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enif I look anything like I feel in fact I look like complete and utter crap right now don't I let's go ahead and fix that all right I am a lot more presentable now at least I think okay so today's topic obviously is about vpns and I'm going to tell you why everybody connected to the internet needs a VPN and if you're thinking to yourself right now well I don't need a VPN I'm not connected to the internet well you're a big fat liar cuz you're watching this video right now on the internet and if you're not well damn that's talent or you're in the room or something all right so VPN stands for a virtual private Network and it does exactly what it sounds like it does it keeps your connection private encrypted and Anonymous but there's a lot of different uses to a VPN and you might be thinking as a regular user of the internet why do I need a VPN well I'm going to tell you today at least in this video a couple of different scenarios of why you might want a VPN and we're going to also do a little demo of a VPN service that I'm using completely unsolicited completely they have no idea I'm doing this this is not an affiliate thing this is not a a sponsorship this is just me having spent a lot of money in the last week trying out a lot of different vpns and then going with the best one so I've kind of done a lot of the research for you and uh maybe it'll help you guys in the long run so that's why I decided to do this video Plus on Twitter a lot of you wanted to know more about the VPN service I'm using so I figured we'd go ahead and do it official the new z170 classified motherboard from EVGA features 8-phase pwm four-way SLI support along with top-notch components to offer Gamers and enthusiasts more of what they want a badass motherboard with no compromises click the link below to learn more so when I worked in it we had a physical VPN setup through Cisco where we had physical Hardware with a built-in VPN and firewall and proxy so I'll admit I haven't had to use a service like this in the last 10 years because I had access to a physical one that we controlled that wasn't something I subscribed to so it all works the same way but as a subscriber to a VPN service you're connecting to a server that you pay for whereas I was used to connecting to a server which we owned and controlled but since I don't work there anymore I don't have access to that VPN now vpns do a few things they mask your IP so your real IP your ISP provided IP uh is not seen by the internet which makes it harder for things like dos and hacking and and you know whatever else people would do with that IP secondly it tricks the internet into fooling your geolocation which tells the internet you're connecting from a physical data center or ISP location and so you can fool the internet into thinking you're anywhere in the world where VPN is accessible via your service the other thing it does is it completely encrypts your data which makes it much harder to hack into your your internet or your computer or your connection when the data is encrypted and multiple levels of encryption now you might be thinking I'm not a streamer no one's going to Dos me why do I do I need a VPN well it also tricks the internet into thinking you're connecting from somewhere else if you were in Germany you've more than likely sent me a message or been unable to connect to YouTube to watch our Tech talk live stream on Thursdays because for whatever reason Germany is very strict on allowing live stream access into the country so if you were connected to a VPN that was outside of Germany then you bypass that geo location lock and you're able to watch live streams and videos and whatever else it may be now another reason that the PN are actually very very important is your ISP will monitor the data that you are sending to and from the data center and will throttle your connection in a lot of cases based on what you're connecting to we all know that there was some big Fiasco with Verizon and Comcast and other companies that were slowing down connections to Netflix and YouTube and Amazon and Hulu companies that sell streaming services eat up a lot of data so the isps don't like that so they will monitor the traffic going to and from your router and if they see that you're going to a high bandwidth uh service like Netflix then they slow down your connection you ever been watching a live stream on Netflix and all of a sudden it pops up and says Netflix uh speed has changed reconfiguring your stream and next thing you know you're watching a standard dep instead of a high def stream more than likely your ISP just throttled you but if you were on a VPN the ISP cannot monitor that traffic going to and from your router because it sees one constant stream of encrypted data and cannot throttle you so you could find that a VPN gives you better internet access and better streaming performance because of the fact that the ISP has no freaking idea what you're doing all right so let's go ahead and turn around I'm going to give you a demonstration of how VPN works because one of the problems with VPN Services is you never know how fast it's going to be because when you're encrypting that data stream going back and forth to the server your speed is going to slow down because of the encryption happening on your end and then the decryption happening on the other end and then the re-encryption happening on the other end sent back to you and being decrypted again so that slows down your connection a little bit and increases your ping by how much well let's go a and turn around and take a look transition all right so the service I'm going to be showing you today is called astral a s r i l l and this was actually recommended to me by Barnacles uh somebody I really trust when it comes to networking he knows way more than I do uh but it's pronounced astral kind of like an ass in front of your nostril you can actually choose the different type of encryption you want to use right here so you've got open web which is kind of like a browser based you've got open VPN is what we're going to be using here today when you open up the astral service and you log in you can see all the different servers that you have access to right here you can see there's quite a few of them offline but we've got South Africa I could connect to Melbourne that' be a fun one to do a speed test on now each one of these servers also has their own Dynamic uh IP range so you're not going to get the same IP every single time just like your ISP it's going to release and renew those IPS which is what's going to keep your VPN uh worth having at least if you're trying to mask your IP which is one of the major reasons why I'm doing this now I've gone ahead and turned off the VPN because we want to do a speed test for before and after the encryption so we can see how much speed we're losing you are going to lose speed by connecting to a VPN tunnel but uh how much speed you lose is really going to be dependent on how strong the servers are how many people are connected to the servers your distance from the server the nodes and access points between you and the server so there's a lot of different things involved here now we're going to go ahead and run a speed test before and after as you can see down here it shows Time Warner Cable as I showed and we are going to go ahead and do a begin test and we will uh we'll come back with those results all right the results are in we've got a 12 millisecond ping a very consistent 354 Mbps connection and an upload speed of 24.11 so let's go ahead and connect to the VPN here in San Francisco and that's not actually that close to me I'm in Los Angeles I might actually show LA here on the uh the connection but that's fine so let's go ahead and reload the page Now by reloading the page with the VPN on you can see that our traffic is now coming from the 209 IP so we're connecting to San Francisco uh we're going to connect to an LA server Via San Francisco so my traffic is going to go from where I am up to San Francisco and back and we'll see how that actually does all right so while connected to the VPN our ping jumped up quite considerably 100 extra milliseconds that wouldn't be desired for say gaming but if you were doing encrypted data transfer this wouldn't be a big deal uh we lost about 90 megabits you can see we had some fluctuation in there and we only lost 2 megabits up about 90 down that's actually very respectable uh there were some services that I connected to like uh let's see here IP vanish terrible Service never go to IP vanish I actually dropped all the way down to 10 megabits per second 10 that was absolutely unacceptable so I I need to get a refund from them uh so let's go a and connect to one that's closer though because honestly you would want to connect to one that's near you uh unless you were doing the geolocation thing I changed my mind we're going to go ahead and connect to New York uh because we want to see how the connection across the country is so we'll do a a New York speed test here all right we're connected to New York we'll refresh the speed test and it's going to show a different location now you can see now we have a different well it still says 209 the rest of the numbers are different you just have to trust me on that but we are connected to New York you can see the geo location now shows that that's where we are uh so let's go ahead and do a speed test in New York yeah so once again the Ping is sitting just over 100 113 millisecond ping connection speed is looking fantastic here at 235 232 that's very very very acceptable the up as you can see is hardly affected I mean I wouldn't call that affected at all from the San Francisco test so as you can see astral is doing a fantastic job of keeping this service very very fast all right so for the last test we're going to go ahead and connect to Los Angeles so we'll be connecting to a nearby VPN doing a speed test at a nearby by uh location so let's go ahead and see how well this works so once again you can see the IP change so now you're seeing the benefits of a VPN now obviously our speeds are very very similar to the San Francisco connection but look at this look at the Ping this is what matters if you're gaming on a VPN this ping is pretty damn good it was what only what four points four milliseconds higher than without the VPN and the upload is again fairly unaffected so you guys can see now why vpn's with a fast service are important and uh everybody needs one trust me so there you have it I took barnicle's suggestion and tried out astral and I have to say it is by far the fastest service I've tried out yet now I've tried out quite a few others IP vanish cyber ghost um private internet access the Viper and just to name a few and and this was by far the the fastest consistently I've been using this for several days now I haven't noticed any random disconnects any slowdowns no problems connecting to any servers Skype calls no problem whatsoever so I highly recommend going over to Astro and checking them out I have no affiliate code or anything that's just my suggestion now one of the cool things about uh most VPN Services is you don't have to run them on a client level if you have a a router that will actually allow you to plug in VPN information or if you have a router that's flashable to something like DDWRT which is a custom firmware then you can plug in the VPN information into the router where any traffic going through the router is then tunneled through that VPN it's a little bit bit takes a little bit longer and a little bit uh more time to change the VPN you have to log into your router and change it reboot your router and all that stuff uh but then again if you have a lot of machines that you worried about actually connecting to the internet and hiding your IP then you can go ahead and do it at a router level at a router level that's hard to say you can you can go and do it at the router level as well all right guys so that's my video here about VPN and why you should use one why it's smart to use one and I hope it's helped you guys learn something also too you guys can actually help out in this video cuz I know a lot of you are using VPN Services now if you're using a VPN service that you subscribe to the astral is like $6 a month or something silly like that if you buy a year you get an even better discount so for six bucks a month protecting your information is it's stupid not to so if you're using a VPN service why don't you help each other out by doing this tell everybody what service you have tell everybody what your un uh encrypted VP or download speed and upload speed is and then what your encrypted download speed and upload speed is so people can get an idea of what the VPN service speeds are actually like all right we're going to get out of here I have talked and said way too many words and things I'm sure there's only a few of you still watching this video so to the six of you who stayed all the way to the end I love you guys and to the rest of you well you're not going to hear this anyway but I will see you guys in the next video of course thanks for watchingif I look anything like I feel in fact I look like complete and utter crap right now don't I let's go ahead and fix that all right I am a lot more presentable now at least I think okay so today's topic obviously is about vpns and I'm going to tell you why everybody connected to the internet needs a VPN and if you're thinking to yourself right now well I don't need a VPN I'm not connected to the internet well you're a big fat liar cuz you're watching this video right now on the internet and if you're not well damn that's talent or you're in the room or something all right so VPN stands for a virtual private Network and it does exactly what it sounds like it does it keeps your connection private encrypted and Anonymous but there's a lot of different uses to a VPN and you might be thinking as a regular user of the internet why do I need a VPN well I'm going to tell you today at least in this video a couple of different scenarios of why you might want a VPN and we're going to also do a little demo of a VPN service that I'm using completely unsolicited completely they have no idea I'm doing this this is not an affiliate thing this is not a a sponsorship this is just me having spent a lot of money in the last week trying out a lot of different vpns and then going with the best one so I've kind of done a lot of the research for you and uh maybe it'll help you guys in the long run so that's why I decided to do this video Plus on Twitter a lot of you wanted to know more about the VPN service I'm using so I figured we'd go ahead and do it official the new z170 classified motherboard from EVGA features 8-phase pwm four-way SLI support along with top-notch components to offer Gamers and enthusiasts more of what they want a badass motherboard with no compromises click the link below to learn more so when I worked in it we had a physical VPN setup through Cisco where we had physical Hardware with a built-in VPN and firewall and proxy so I'll admit I haven't had to use a service like this in the last 10 years because I had access to a physical one that we controlled that wasn't something I subscribed to so it all works the same way but as a subscriber to a VPN service you're connecting to a server that you pay for whereas I was used to connecting to a server which we owned and controlled but since I don't work there anymore I don't have access to that VPN now vpns do a few things they mask your IP so your real IP your ISP provided IP uh is not seen by the internet which makes it harder for things like dos and hacking and and you know whatever else people would do with that IP secondly it tricks the internet into fooling your geolocation which tells the internet you're connecting from a physical data center or ISP location and so you can fool the internet into thinking you're anywhere in the world where VPN is accessible via your service the other thing it does is it completely encrypts your data which makes it much harder to hack into your your internet or your computer or your connection when the data is encrypted and multiple levels of encryption now you might be thinking I'm not a streamer no one's going to Dos me why do I do I need a VPN well it also tricks the internet into thinking you're connecting from somewhere else if you were in Germany you've more than likely sent me a message or been unable to connect to YouTube to watch our Tech talk live stream on Thursdays because for whatever reason Germany is very strict on allowing live stream access into the country so if you were connected to a VPN that was outside of Germany then you bypass that geo location lock and you're able to watch live streams and videos and whatever else it may be now another reason that the PN are actually very very important is your ISP will monitor the data that you are sending to and from the data center and will throttle your connection in a lot of cases based on what you're connecting to we all know that there was some big Fiasco with Verizon and Comcast and other companies that were slowing down connections to Netflix and YouTube and Amazon and Hulu companies that sell streaming services eat up a lot of data so the isps don't like that so they will monitor the traffic going to and from your router and if they see that you're going to a high bandwidth uh service like Netflix then they slow down your connection you ever been watching a live stream on Netflix and all of a sudden it pops up and says Netflix uh speed has changed reconfiguring your stream and next thing you know you're watching a standard dep instead of a high def stream more than likely your ISP just throttled you but if you were on a VPN the ISP cannot monitor that traffic going to and from your router because it sees one constant stream of encrypted data and cannot throttle you so you could find that a VPN gives you better internet access and better streaming performance because of the fact that the ISP has no freaking idea what you're doing all right so let's go ahead and turn around I'm going to give you a demonstration of how VPN works because one of the problems with VPN Services is you never know how fast it's going to be because when you're encrypting that data stream going back and forth to the server your speed is going to slow down because of the encryption happening on your end and then the decryption happening on the other end and then the re-encryption happening on the other end sent back to you and being decrypted again so that slows down your connection a little bit and increases your ping by how much well let's go a and turn around and take a look transition all right so the service I'm going to be showing you today is called astral a s r i l l and this was actually recommended to me by Barnacles uh somebody I really trust when it comes to networking he knows way more than I do uh but it's pronounced astral kind of like an ass in front of your nostril you can actually choose the different type of encryption you want to use right here so you've got open web which is kind of like a browser based you've got open VPN is what we're going to be using here today when you open up the astral service and you log in you can see all the different servers that you have access to right here you can see there's quite a few of them offline but we've got South Africa I could connect to Melbourne that' be a fun one to do a speed test on now each one of these servers also has their own Dynamic uh IP range so you're not going to get the same IP every single time just like your ISP it's going to release and renew those IPS which is what's going to keep your VPN uh worth having at least if you're trying to mask your IP which is one of the major reasons why I'm doing this now I've gone ahead and turned off the VPN because we want to do a speed test for before and after the encryption so we can see how much speed we're losing you are going to lose speed by connecting to a VPN tunnel but uh how much speed you lose is really going to be dependent on how strong the servers are how many people are connected to the servers your distance from the server the nodes and access points between you and the server so there's a lot of different things involved here now we're going to go ahead and run a speed test before and after as you can see down here it shows Time Warner Cable as I showed and we are going to go ahead and do a begin test and we will uh we'll come back with those results all right the results are in we've got a 12 millisecond ping a very consistent 354 Mbps connection and an upload speed of 24.11 so let's go ahead and connect to the VPN here in San Francisco and that's not actually that close to me I'm in Los Angeles I might actually show LA here on the uh the connection but that's fine so let's go ahead and reload the page Now by reloading the page with the VPN on you can see that our traffic is now coming from the 209 IP so we're connecting to San Francisco uh we're going to connect to an LA server Via San Francisco so my traffic is going to go from where I am up to San Francisco and back and we'll see how that actually does all right so while connected to the VPN our ping jumped up quite considerably 100 extra milliseconds that wouldn't be desired for say gaming but if you were doing encrypted data transfer this wouldn't be a big deal uh we lost about 90 megabits you can see we had some fluctuation in there and we only lost 2 megabits up about 90 down that's actually very respectable uh there were some services that I connected to like uh let's see here IP vanish terrible Service never go to IP vanish I actually dropped all the way down to 10 megabits per second 10 that was absolutely unacceptable so I I need to get a refund from them uh so let's go a and connect to one that's closer though because honestly you would want to connect to one that's near you uh unless you were doing the geolocation thing I changed my mind we're going to go ahead and connect to New York uh because we want to see how the connection across the country is so we'll do a a New York speed test here all right we're connected to New York we'll refresh the speed test and it's going to show a different location now you can see now we have a different well it still says 209 the rest of the numbers are different you just have to trust me on that but we are connected to New York you can see the geo location now shows that that's where we are uh so let's go ahead and do a speed test in New York yeah so once again the Ping is sitting just over 100 113 millisecond ping connection speed is looking fantastic here at 235 232 that's very very very acceptable the up as you can see is hardly affected I mean I wouldn't call that affected at all from the San Francisco test so as you can see astral is doing a fantastic job of keeping this service very very fast all right so for the last test we're going to go ahead and connect to Los Angeles so we'll be connecting to a nearby VPN doing a speed test at a nearby by uh location so let's go ahead and see how well this works so once again you can see the IP change so now you're seeing the benefits of a VPN now obviously our speeds are very very similar to the San Francisco connection but look at this look at the Ping this is what matters if you're gaming on a VPN this ping is pretty damn good it was what only what four points four milliseconds higher than without the VPN and the upload is again fairly unaffected so you guys can see now why vpn's with a fast service are important and uh everybody needs one trust me so there you have it I took barnicle's suggestion and tried out astral and I have to say it is by far the fastest service I've tried out yet now I've tried out quite a few others IP vanish cyber ghost um private internet access the Viper and just to name a few and and this was by far the the fastest consistently I've been using this for several days now I haven't noticed any random disconnects any slowdowns no problems connecting to any servers Skype calls no problem whatsoever so I highly recommend going over to Astro and checking them out I have no affiliate code or anything that's just my suggestion now one of the cool things about uh most VPN Services is you don't have to run them on a client level if you have a a router that will actually allow you to plug in VPN information or if you have a router that's flashable to something like DDWRT which is a custom firmware then you can plug in the VPN information into the router where any traffic going through the router is then tunneled through that VPN it's a little bit bit takes a little bit longer and a little bit uh more time to change the VPN you have to log into your router and change it reboot your router and all that stuff uh but then again if you have a lot of machines that you worried about actually connecting to the internet and hiding your IP then you can go ahead and do it at a router level at a router level that's hard to say you can you can go and do it at the router level as well all right guys so that's my video here about VPN and why you should use one why it's smart to use one and I hope it's helped you guys learn something also too you guys can actually help out in this video cuz I know a lot of you are using VPN Services now if you're using a VPN service that you subscribe to the astral is like $6 a month or something silly like that if you buy a year you get an even better discount so for six bucks a month protecting your information is it's stupid not to so if you're using a VPN service why don't you help each other out by doing this tell everybody what service you have tell everybody what your un uh encrypted VP or download speed and upload speed is and then what your encrypted download speed and upload speed is so people can get an idea of what the VPN service speeds are actually like all right we're going to get out of here I have talked and said way too many words and things I'm sure there's only a few of you still watching this video so to the six of you who stayed all the way to the end I love you guys and to the rest of you well you're not going to hear this anyway but I will see you guys in the next video of course thanks for watching\n"