Tyler Nichols Weblog

Since I got my new nifty Macbook Pro I have decided to visit Panera bread more often to work on some of my web sites and also get some blogging done. Working remotely offers a refreshing change from my home office.

Since I will be working off public wifi in these situations, I needed to have a VPN solution to protect myself from possible traffic sniffers and other nasty things that can happen on open wifi.

After a decent amount of research, I found Witopia and their PersonalVPN service. PersonalVPN uses SSL-VPN (via OpenVPN) which is more secure than other methods such as PPTP.

When using the VPN service, I haven’t noticed any network speed difference. I have had one issue though pertaining to the tunnelblick vpn software client they use. If the client is left running when shutting down, my macbook takes about a minute and a half or so to shut down. Not a big deal, but it was a little frustrating not knowing why it took so shutdown OS X.

If you are working remotely and rely of free wifi access, you need to protect yourself and your data. I highly recommend Witopia. Witopia is for BOTH Mac and Windows, but I can only comment on their Mac service.

For a Witopia discount use SHXPT to save 10%, bringing the cost down to only $36 for the year!