If you’re on the fence, you can get a generous 45-day, money-back trial, which makes a lot more sense than trialing Hotspot Shield’s free basic plan with its puny 500 MB of data per day or a 2-Mbps connection. How Much Does Hotspot Shield Cost?Īt $7.99 per month on the yearly plan, Hotspot Shield’s pricing is at the low end of the high end. Hotspot Shield also passed any DNS leak tests I threw at it, and it hasn’t conked out yet. In my own speed tests, Hotspot Shield was indeed wicked fast, but only when I let it choose my protocol for me. But it’s got its own Catapult Hydra protocol, which is rumored to be so fast and reliable, companies like MacAfee and Beijing-based Cheetah Mobile use it to fuel their own VPNs. For instance, it doesn’t use OpenVPN at all. Hotspot Shield doesn’t have as many protocol options as some of the big VPN guns. The Hotspot Shield dashboard, on the other hand, is packed with a typical amount of information, including server loads, which I thought was great. But after I made a few key security tweaks under the hood (which I’ll tell you all about), I was pretty much covered. The Mac client is unusually stripped down. Hotspot Shield: One-Minute Breakdown How Easy Is It to Use Hotspot Shield?Īfter a few minor road bumps, the Hotspot Shield dashboard was a piece of cake.

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