Hong Kong is a bustling cosmopolitan city and nation state that has different laws from China. If you are living there long term or you are just visiting for a short amount of time to do a little sightseeing, you need to make sure that you have your Internet security locked down. You might also find during your stay that you don’t have access to many of the websites that you enjoyed back in your home country. Believe it or not, Internet censorship laws in Hong Kong do cause some amount of content to disappear from the Internet. China has some very strict censorship laws, and video streaming sites and social media sites often get blocked in China and Hong Kong has some similarities in their laws.
However, having said that, Hong Kong is usually less stringent than China, a country where a VPN is indispensable, and on the whole Hong Kong is much more lax. There are some basic laws that apply to most other countries that criminalize child pornography, obscenely violent and offensive images, and pirated materials, but by and large people in Hong Kong enjoy a mostly-free Internet. For example, a website won’t become blocked because it was expressing a political view. But unblocking websites is only one concern among many that you should have when you are visiting Hong Kong.
A lot of people rightfully fear foreign governments and their ability to eavesdrop and implement surveillance measures on the general population. While this isn’t near as much of a threat in Hong Kong as it is in other places such as the United States or the UK, there are other attackers independent of the government that you need to watch out for. In Hong Kong, there are more people concentrated in a small area than most other places in the world – and you can bet money that there are hackers living in Hong Kong. But how do you know who they are and identify them? You probably can’t, and for all you know you are sharing an Internet connection or Wi-Fi signal with one.
It would be a colossal mistake to let your information travel through the local Internet infrastructure in Hong Kong without first encrypting your data to keep it safe from prying eyes. Especially if that data is destined for your home country, because the government in your home country could easily intercept and read the data you are sending simply because it came from a foreign location. Most of us love our home countries, but do you really want your government reading your private messages? Of course not.
Fortunately all of these problems can be solved with an inexpensive VPN service that will unblock websites and encrypt your traffic to keep it safe from hackers and governmental agencies. If you are traveling to Hong Kong in the near future or you are living there long-term, you should consider options on our list of VPNs for Hong Kong:
Best VPNs for Hong Kong
VyprVPN – Complete Review
VyprVPN, unlike some of the other providers on this list, is not based in Hong Kong. Instead, they are based out of Switzerland and they offer up to three concurrent connections with their service with the added benefit of no usage logs – the legal climate in Switzerland doesn’t require VPN companies to keep any logs. Not only do they offer extremely strong encryption technologies, but they also offer a 7-day money back guarantee to give you a chance to test their service first. Though they may not be as cheap as some competing services, they are a top pick for those of you spending time in Hong Kong.
ibVPN – Complete Review
ibVPN provides customers with a great value. They provide excellent VPN speeds and they also offer some great configuration guides on their website. They are priced extremely low within the VPN service marketplace, and you can get their service for as little as $3.00 per month. However, as they say – you get what you pay for. As you might expect from a service so inexpensive, they don’t currently offer 24/7 support. However, they do offer a great VPN service that is cheaper than most other services in the industry that will provide residents of Hong Kong with an inexpensive alternative to VPNs that cost upwards of $8 or $10 dollars per month.
Private Internet Access – Complete Review
PIA VPN is incredibly inexpensive but improves upon the ibVPN service with their customer service. They offer access to over 3,000 servers located in over 21 countries, and their service can be as cheap as $3.33 per month when you buy a full 1-year subscription – which puts them in the same price range as ibVPN. Furthermore, they offer some handy features such as DNS leak protection and a VPN kill-switch that will stop downloads if your VPN disconnects. They will even protect your anonymity by accepting Bitcoin payments but there is one downside. They do not offer a free-trial or a money back guarantee. However, all in all, they are a fantastic service that is fairly inexpensive that will help the residents of Hong Kong unblock website and protect their personal information.
IPVanish – Complete Review
IPVanish has servers located in Hong Kong as well, but most people want foreign servers to protect international communications. However, IPVanish is reasonably priced at $6.49 per month when you purchase a 1-year subscription and they have a reputation for providing an extremely fast and reliable VPN connection service. They will also provide you with a 7-day money back guarantee to ensure that you are satisfied with their service. Last but not least, consider that they can give you access to 40,000+ IPs on 350+ servers spread out across 60+ countries.
PureVPN – Complete Review
Last but not least is PureVPN, which offers residents of Hong Kong and extremely reasonably priced VPN service at just $4.16 per month with a 1-year plan. They will provide you access to 500+ servers in 141 countries (and counting). Not only do they offer DNS leak protection and a VPN kill-switch, but they offer the extremely attractive feature of allowing you to connect up to 5 devices simultaneously with 1 account. Also, they don’t impose any data restrictions and they don’t throttle any of their users’ bandwidth.