Whether you want to take a vacation, travel for your career, or you have family scattered around the globe, there are many great reasons to visit Asia. But jetting off to an exciting Asian destination will present its fair share of challenges. When you travel you need to be even more concerned with Internet security, because countries throughout Asia have drastically different Internet privacy and Internet laws. While Canada, the UK, Australia, and the US don’t engage in Internet censorship as much as other countries, trying to access your favorite websites in Asia can be extremely challenging. For example, I’m sure you have all heard about the Internet censorship in China. But China is just the tip of the iceberg. Asia is a big place, and you will undoubtedly run into censorship problems as you travel. Furthermore, would you really want to risk a foreign government or Internet service provider monitoring your communications and capturing your data? Not a chance.
But you also need to be concerned with what your home country is doing to monitor your data as well. If you are accessing resources hosted in your home country, the government may have the right to tap into your data to see what you are transmitting in an effort to protect against the threat of foreign terrorists. For example, the N.S.A. had claimed that they were wiretapping communications that were one end domestic and one end foreign. But what if you’re just sending an email to check up on your family back home? Protecting your data with a VPN is a great way to stop the government from intruding on your personal communications.
The easiest solution to protect your data and unblock your favorite websites as you travel is to use an inexpensive VPN service. But not all VPN service providers were created equally. Some are better suited for protecting your data online than others. If you are visiting Asia or you live there long term, you need to know the best VPNs for Asia. The following are the top services that will allow you to browse the web freely and securely.
Private Internet Access – Full Review
Private Internet Access doesn’t have servers in as many countries as their competitors, but they do have value in the amount of servers they provide. For example, though they only have servers in about 20 countries, they provide access to over 3,000 servers. Though their endpoints are primarily in North America and Europe, they do also have servers in Japan. However, their strong encryption, quantity of servers, and reliable service will help you unblock websites as you travel across Asia. If you are just looking for a VPN service to unblock websites and protect your data from the prying eyes of foreign governments, a Private Internet Access VPN is an optimal choice.
NordVPN – Full Review
NordVPN has hundreds of servers in Asia and the list of countries covered in this region includes Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. You will find options that support P2P, double VPN and obfuscation technology. NordVPN is considered as one of the most reliable solutions due to the high encryption that it uses, as well as its advanced security features such as Tor over VPN. If you want to stream content, you can also rely on NordVPN’s fast speeds. This provider doesn’t keep any logs at all, which makes it an appealing choice for privacy conscious users.
As such, having a VPN service with servers in over 121 countries is a huge advantage. Not only will you have the ability to connect to your home country’s Internet infrastructure, but you can also select foreign countries to improve application performance and decrease latency.
Surfshark– Full Review
In Asia, Surfshark has great coverage and it allows you to overcome restrictions and keep your information protected. You can connect to servers in India, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and more. Surfshark doesn’t keep any logs that could put your privacy at risk and it protects your information with strong encryption. The CleanWeb features prevents malware, ads and trackers that could affect your browsing experience. You can also enjoy great speeds for gaming, streaming or downloading content.
ExpressVPN – Full Review
Though most times people want a VPN connection back to their home country to unblock a website, doing so from Asia can introduce some steep latency costs. This is especially true of bandwidth sensitive applications like streaming video. As such, it is better to try to unblock them by using a VPN server in an adjacent country as your VPN endpoint. Fortunately, Express VPN has servers in over 14 Asian countries, so you have plenty of options at your disposal. If you do want to connect back to your home country, Express VPN has servers in over 78 of the leading countries, so you’ll have no problem connecting back to the Internet in your home country.
VyprVPN – Full Review
Vypr VPN has several locations spread throughout Asia including Japan, Thailand, China, Philippines, Indonesia, and South Korea if you need to connect to an Asian server in order to circumvent your particular location’s Internet restrictions. However, if you want to connect to a server in an area that enjoys less Internet censorship, you have plenty of options – especially in the United States and Europe. Though they are not the cheapest VPN provider, understand that you get what you pay for. They offer top-notch reliable services and they are still very affordably priced at $6.49 per month when you opt for a 1 year subscription.
IronSocket – Full Review
IronSocket VPN is another great VPN in Asia. In fact, they are based out of Hong Kong which is well-known to have some of the most lax Internet laws in the world. There are practically no censorship laws or legal issues regarding data retention like there are with other surveillance states. They even offer connections to servers located in 36 different countries. One of the most notable and admirable features of their service is its speed, which has been proven to transfer data very quickly. You will run into a little extra latency if the server you want to connect to is on the other side of the world, but that is a small price to pay for security, anonymity, and the ability to circumvent censorship.
In Summary
It would be much more advantageous to select one of these 5 VPN providers if you are traveling to Asia. Though there are cheaper options, the savings are very negligible. At most you could probably save one dollar per month, and the quality of service from a smaller and cheaper provider wouldn’t compare to these 5 providers. Furthermore, the smaller providers typically don’t have as many global locations, so your connection options would be severely limited.
