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How to Use a VPN Beginners Guide
6K views
Jun 23, 2024
Dive into the basics of using a VPN with this beginner-friendly guide. This video tutorial explains what a VPN is, how it works, and why you should use one to enhance your online privacy and security. Follow step-by-step instructions to install and configure a VPN on various devices, including computers and smartphones. Learn how to connect to different server locations, protect your data on public Wi-Fi, and access geo-restricted content. Perfect for those new to VPNs, this guide ensures you can start browsing the internet safely and anonymously in no time.
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In today's video, I want to show you how to set up a VPN and how to use a VPN
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And if you're new to the whole world of VPN, you're not sure if it's a beneficial thing for you to use
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I'll also give you exactly what it is and why you would benefit from using it
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Now, what is a VPN and what does it do exactly? A VPN does two important things
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It helps you stay private. So your online activities stay private, and it also helps you stay more secure
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Now, every device that is connected to an internet is assigned an IP
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And one of the main benefits of a VPN is it actually masks that IP address
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So you won't be identified using your IP address when you're using a device
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to connect to any website or any app. Now, another big benefit of a VPN is that it actually encrypts your data
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So that increases security, reduces your chances of getting hacked. So the way it does that is right now, when you use your phone or your
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computer and you communicate with another device, like another website, for example, the data is going from you to that device, that server
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With a VPN, it actually goes from you to the VPN server, gets encrypted
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and then it gets sent to that website. So if anyone has the ability, like a hacker, to actually jump in in
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between and intercept that data, now it's actually encrypted, so they won't
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be able to see what's in the data. And that will significantly improve security by making sure your data is
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not falling into the wrong hands. And probably one of the biggest benefits of a VPN is privacy
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So VPN companies that provide VPN services will not track your activity
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online, so whatever you're doing online will remain private. Now I'm going to show you two different VPN providers here, and they work for
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the computer and any mobile device that you have. Now, one of them is going to be paid, but it's the biggest one
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It's the one I use personally. And the other one does have some paid upgrades, but it also has a free
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option too, with some limitations. Now, the only downside of a VPN, in my opinion, is the
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fact that it reduces speed. So the free ones have a really big problem with speed
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Now the paid ones do still reduce the speed, but not at all to the significant
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level of the free VPNs out there. So that's why I want to show you two of the biggest reputable options that
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have the least speed reduction, especially with the paid version of them
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And if you look into other ones, I'll show you how to actually compare different VPNs with this free tool online to see how many people are using each one
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Now, let me show you these two VPN providers and exactly how to set it up
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And I recommend you start on the desktop and then make your desktop
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secure with this VPN, one of these, and then jump into the mobile app
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You could actually get the apps for these platforms and then make sure
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your mobile phone is secure as well. So this VPN is called NordVPN
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This is probably the biggest VPN provider in the world. And this other one is called ProtonVPN
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So let me just briefly show you the difference here. With NordVPN, if you go to the pricing tab of it, Nord doesn't have a free option
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but because again, it's the most reputable, it's the biggest, and it's the most used
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I'm showing you this here first. And the setup process is by far the easiest for any VPN I've tried out
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So it's one of my favorites, the one I use personally. And this one, again, you could pay monthly and I'll put some links in the
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description here that you could click. And there's ProtonVPN. So with ProtonVPN, they do actually have a free option
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So if you go to their pricing page, it says sign up for free. Now let me explain the limitations and you'll come across any free VPN that you
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see that will have the same limitations. Typically the free versions of them are limited to how many countries
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you could actually tap into. So in this case, there's only three different countries available
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Now this one also will reduce your speed. Pretty much any free VPN will reduce your speed pretty noticeably
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Where the paid ones, the speed reduction is not very noticeable. So you might not notice it at all
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So you can see highest VPN speed and same thing if you use the paid version with Nord
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So let me show you here how to set up Nord and the process is pretty much the same with ProtonVPN
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And let me show you this free tool I mentioned to compare VPNs. This is a plugin here called SimilarWeb
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It's totally free. You could also use it at similarweb.com. And when you go to a website and you click this Chrome extension, it's going
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to show you how many people are using this website so you could see 13 million
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people or 14 million people in some cases per month are using this, making
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it one of the biggest VPN, if not the biggest, and you could also see where
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the traffic for this platform is coming from, it's mostly centralized in the
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US here with some European countries making up the rest of the numbers
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You could again, look at the same thing for ProtonVPN here and see some of those numbers
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This has about four to 5 million people using it per month. Again, pretty significant number of people
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And you could see this is mostly used in Russia and India and 13% or so in the US
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So I do usually look at this when I'm comparing VPNs to see, well, what
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country are people using this? Is it in my country? Does it make sense for me? And what's the biggest one
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Because again, with VPNs, I want the most security and most privacy
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So I'd rather go with the most reputable option available. So if you set up NordVPN, just go to the download tab
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Again, there's a link below for both of these in the description of this video. And you could see it's available for every type of platform from Windows to Mac
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I'm going to set it up here on a Mac, but the app for Windows is pretty much identical and I'm going to set up the iOS version of it for my iPhone
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The Android version is very, very similar as well. And you could learn more about what a VPN is basically what I
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explained in the beginning of the video. So let's go ahead and download the app here. So I'm going to go ahead and get Nord here
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I've already signed up, so I'm going to log into my account, but you could sign up with any of these plans and see the differences here, let me go ahead and
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log in, and once you set it up, you could go to the Nord VPN service and you
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could download it again, if you have Windows, download it for Windows, if you have a Mac or Linux, download it for that and install the app on your computer
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And I'll show you how to do it for the phone as well. So once you sign up and log in, this is the desktop app
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It's super simple to get started with. All you have to do is just press quick connect up here
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And it's going to connect you. If you give it access here, it's going to connect you to the nearest server
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here that it thinks you want to connect to. So right now it just connected me to the one that is nearest to me in the US
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But if you take a look at this map, these are all the different servers
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you could connect to around the world. So if you go to South America, you'll see some options
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There is an option in Africa here on the South Africa. There's all these European and Asian options for servers that you could connect to
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So all you have to do is either choose a country here on the left side, or you
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could just click on one of these servers over here, and it's going to connect you
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Automatically. I did not have to do anything advanced. It's literally just a map and I could just move around the
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map and click to any server. Now, as long as I click on one of these servers and it protects
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and connects me to that server. It's as if I'm standing right over here now when I connect to the internet
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So let me click on this one in South America here, and it just took a second to connect me
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And as long as you give it a second and you access the internet or any app, it's
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going to actually connect you from this server to the internet rather than
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the server that is nearest to you. So now if I go to google.com, you could see now I'm actually connected
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from a different country based on where I connected my VPN. Anytime you want to disconnect again, you could just go ahead and
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disconnect from right on top. And then you could always pick a country and quick connect from here
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Now, as long as you've set up an account, you could actually protect your mobile phone too
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Let me show you exactly how this works. This is going to be real quick. All you have to do is go to the app store or the Google play store
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If you're using an Android phone. Now, Nord VPN actually has an app here that you could just go ahead and install
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I'm going to go ahead and open it up. Now you want to log in using the same username and password
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I've already set that up on the desktop. So I'm going to go ahead and log in and it works the exact
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same way as the desktop one. All I have to do is press quick connect right over here
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Press allow, and it's connected me to the server near me again, a VPN server
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So my IP address has now changed. And I could go ahead and quickly change this if I want, based on all the
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different countries that are available. So if I want to choose a different country, I'll just choose France here
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For example, I'll just click on it and it's going to actually connect me over here
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So look on top. It says connected to France. And then right here, that little VPN icon showed up and let me show
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you how to quickly turn it off too. It shows up in the settings app of your phone
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You could go over here and right under the settings app, you have this new
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connection called VPN connecting. So you could go ahead and turn it off from here or from the Nord app
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If you do it from the Nord app, simply just press pause or disconnect and
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it will disconnect you from a VPN. I hope you found this video useful
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Please give it a thumbs up and I'll see you in the next video
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