CyberGhost evidently wants to be the most user-friendly VPN there is. Rather than opening with a bland list of servers, it presents six big colourful buttons to access its various connection modes and options.
The first – “Surf Anonymously” – simply routes your traffic over an encrypted channel to prevent your ISP and others from monitoring and tracing your activity. By default, CyberGhost chooses a nearby server to minimise the impact on your connection speed – in our tests it chose an exit node about five miles away – but you can choose to route your traffic via any one of the 29 available countries.
The “Torrent Anonymously” button speaks for itself: click it and your traffic will be routed through a peer-to-peer friendly server. “Unblock Basic Websites” meanwhile opens a menu of commonly blocked websites, including Facebook, Google and Instagram, as well as news and current affairs resources such as CNN, Euronews and Wikileaks. Click on any one of them and CyberGhost will automatically set up a VPN tunnel and open the site in your browser.
And there’s no prizes for guessing what “Unblock streaming” does. Again, you get big clickable buttons, this time for 21 video and music services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO and Hulu. Each one has a drop-down menu beneath it, so you can choose the most popular locations to access it from. Sadly, when it comes to Netflix you’re limited to the Danish, French and German libraries – predictably, the US and Canadian sites are blocked.
In truth, these various options aren’t wholly necessary: click the “Choose my VPN server” button and you can select an exit node for yourself, from a list of servers detailing each one’s geographical location, user load and ping time. The last big button is “Protect my WiFi connection”, which lets you choose whether to activate the VPN automatically when you connect to a recognised SSID. In addition, a general settings pane lets you set specific websites that should always be accessed over your local connection – useful if, for example, your email needs a local intranet connection. Or, you can set individual programs – such as your web browser or BitTorrent client - to always use a VPN connection.
CyberGhost is a pretty good performer. Routing our traffic via New York left us still enjoying 73% of our non-VPN bandwidth. And at £21 a year, it’s certainly affordable – although that licence only allows you to use one device at a time. For up to five devices at once, you’ll need a “Premium Plus” subscription, costing £34, but that’s still cheaper than almost any other rival.
There’s also a free tier, which lets you use the “Unblock Basic Websites” function: this means you can’t choose to route your data via a specific country, but it provides a degree of privacy. The company’s based in Romania, so while your subscription details are stored within the EU, they’re not directly subject to the sort of surveillance regime you’d find in the US.
| Buy CyberGhost now |
Verdict
For technical users, CyberGhost’s eager-to-help design might feel like it gets in the way a bit. But if you don’t want to be bothered with technical details, it’s an affordable VPN that’s certainly easy to use.