Using VPN for commercial purposes

Do you need a VPN to collect data for your business?

Free VPNs would usually let you unblock some services and website. Premium VPNs will also encrypt your data and hide your original IP.

But what if you need a VPN for your business, for larger scale scraping and you want to automate your operation?

You need a proxy service for businesses.

What is a proxy service for businesses?

It is a proxy network with millions of IPs that lets you access large scale of information with more complex blocking. It also provides advanced options, such as:

• Multiple IP types (data-center / residential / mobile)
• IP geolocation (most services offer country level, some offer city level)
• Custom User-Agent and headers
• Concurrent sessions
• Exclusive IPs

Some of the services also offer tools that help with avoiding errors and captchas, automating data collection, checking links and ads, and enhances the web browser’s capabilities.

How to choose a proxy service?

Main 3 points to consider when choosing your proxy service

1. The first and most important - that the service fully supports your use case. For example, if you verify ads then you may need to check links using IPs of real users (residential and mobile), and you may also need the IPs from specific geolocations and/or carriers.
2. Make sure that the service is fully legal, doesn’t share your private data and approves only legal and ethical use of its service. Some services put themselves, the peers of their network and their customers (you) at risk of being abused and/or dealing with complaints and lawsuits against them.
3. Find a service that provides you with helpful tools. Some proxy tools offer abilities that you didn’t even know that you need but are crucial to some use cases. It would take you a huge amount of money and a long time to develop those abilities on your own.

Here’s why Luminati (a Hola’s partner) may be your best choice

1. With the biggest proxy network in the world including Mobile IPs, Residential IPs and Data Center IPs, Luminati certainly supports your use case.
2. As for today, Luminati is the only proxy service that does a full KYC (know your customer) process and approves only 100% legal activity. Luminati was the first service to offer the IPs of real people, it coined the term “Residential Proxy” and it holds the patents for it.
3. The Luminati Proxy Manager nullifies the need to write any code and provides the ability to easily automate and optimize your operation. The capabilities it brings and the money it saves are enormous. More tools that Luminati offers are the Chrome extension for advanced manual browsing and the Link tester for testing links’ hops and destination URL. All these proxy tools are 100% free for Luminati’s customers.

Try Luminati's services

• Try the Luminati Proxy Manager
• Try Luminati's Chrome extension
• Try Luminati's Link Tester
• Start using Luminati's Mobile , Residential and Data Center proxy networks

Which VPN is good for me? a VPN guide

Paying for a premium VPN when all you need is to access your favorite TV show is almost as sloppy as attempting to browse anonymously with a free VPN and imagining that you’re fully protected.

Knowing which kind of VPN you need is key for getting the best result at the best price.

Free VPN vs Premium VPN

If you’re just looking to access that TV show, then the Hola’s free VPN will be best for you. It’s not encrypted or anonymous, but it’s free. If you choose another VPN service for that, just make sure they are committed to keep your privacy as Hola commits in its privacy policy.

If it’s an encrypted and anonymous VPN that you’re looking for, then you should use a secured VPN like Hola’s premium (paid) VPN.

Using VPN for full anonymity

To keep a totally secure connection requires not only to choose the right VPN, but also to use it the right way.

In his article to TechCrunch “WTF is a VPN?”, Romain Dillet wrote that “No, a VPN doesn’t mean that you’ll be more secure on the internet. It depends on the VPN server.” with the following explanation: “When you use a VPN to change your country, avoid censorship or protect your connection in a coffee shop, the VPN server at the other end can see all your network traffic. You’re just moving the risk down the VPN tunnel, and it can be quite dangerous if you’re not careful enough.” This means that using a private VPN helps to keep your privacy only when you use a secure internet connection as well.

VPN options

Learn more about the different VPN options available for you in the links and the comparison table below, and find the one that fits your needs the best.

External articles

• Different Types of VPNs and When to Use Them (Updated 2018) / vpnMentor
• Which VPN Protocol You Should Use – Five of The Most Common VPN Protocols Compared / TechNadu
• What are the three types of VPN? / HowStuffWorks
• And don’t miss WTF is a VPN? / TechCrunch

Comparison table

Technical name	Product examples	Use case	Downside	Encrypt data	Routes all data	Hides client IP from server
Onion Routing	TOR	Extreme IP and data protection	Very slow	YES	YES	YES
Full VPN	Hola VPN PLUS, ExpressVPN, PrivateVPN	High IP and data protection	VPN servers know your IP, and may sometimes keep log	YES	YES	YES
Unblocker VPN	Hola Free VPN, ProtonVPN	Change website geography, fastest surfing	No privacy protection	Partial	NO	Partial
DNS VPN	Hola DNS VPN	Change website geography, simple setup	No privacy protection	NO	NO	Partial
Remote Access VPN (PPTP/IPSec)	Trend Micro Firewall	Connect to your workplace	Does not protect your online surfing	Partial (only workplace sites)	NO	NO
Site to Site VPN		Connect enterprise locations together	Does not protect your online surfing	Partial (only workplace sites)	NO	NO
Browser HTTP proxy VPN				NO	YES	YES
Browser HTTPS proxy VPN				YES	YES	YES
PPP VPN	DSL modems			NO	YES	NO

Proxy options

Shared proxies

Use the IPs that originate from data-centers (aka ‘static IPs’) to anonymously access web resources with long and stable sessions and fast connections.

Residential proxy

Use the IPs of real people, from any location in the world and with a device of your choice. The sessions are shorter than with data-center IPs, but your identity is that of a real user and you can rest assure that the data you get is accurate.

Yesterday's Compromise of our Google Chrome Developer Account

Yesterday our deployment team discovered that the Hola Chrome extension which was live for a few hours was not the one that our development team uploaded to the Chrome Store. After initial investigation, we found that our Google Chrome Store account was compromised, and that a hacker uploaded a modified version of the extension to the store. We quickly replaced that version with the official version, secured the account, and set about to investigate what the malicious player was attempting to do with this hack.

Within a few hours, we determined that the target of the attack was MEW (MyEtherWallet.com) - the crypto wallet website, and the attack was programmed to inject a JavaScript tag in to the MEW site to "phish" information about MEW accounts that are logging in without being in 'incognito mode', by re-directing the MEW users to the hacker's website.

We notified MEW, notified Google, and ensured that the hacker's web site was down.

You may be affected by this breach if you have had the Hola extension installed while the rogue version was live AND the extension was turned on AND have logged in to your MyEtherWallet.com without being in incognito mode.

Steps We've Taken

Immediately upon learning about the incident, we set up a CyberSecurity response team to investigate the incident. We also took immediate emergency steps to immediately replace the extension, secure the developers account, and to monitor versions on a constant basis to ensure this does not recur.

We are now determining the scope of the compromise, and conducting an assessment on steps that can be taken to help prevent such an incident from occurring in the future. We will share the findings from this analysis with the ecosystem to help ensure a safer Internet environment.

What our users should do

If you are also using CryptoCurrency wallets, we recommend that you change passwords, and that you log in to those sites only in incognito mode, where code injection is not possible. We will also work with the Crypto eco system on standards that will help prevent similar events in this nascent market.

For now, there are no other actions that our users need to take as a result of this incident.

Going forward

We will work with MEW and others in the ecosystem on standards that will make Crypto wallets safer from these forms of attacks.

As always, your privacy and the security of your data are our highest priority. We continually assess our procedures and policies and seek new ways to improve our approach to security.

We set up a 24/7 security customer support team to assist customers who have concerns or questions about the incident. Hola users who have questions or concerns about this incident can contact our security customer support team at privacy@hola.org.

The Hola team