From time to time, proxy and VPN providers are pitching us so as to get featured on our blog. Instead of jumping into their offer without even trying it, we take the time to do a simple review of the service, report it on our blog, leave our comments then leave it to our readers for deciding if they want to adopt that solution or not.
So, lately, the guys from CyberGhost told us they have a new free Proxy and that we should check them out- which we did. So here are our impressions:
CyberGhost’s free proxy is a web-based proxy. This means that as an internet user, I don’t expect to install any software on my computer so as to be able to use it. But with the word free service, I always expect a lot of advertisements (they should be paid in one way or another, aren’t they?)
So I pointed my browser to the proxy server, then, along with the field for entering the URL of the website I want to reach (I chose BBC iPlayer- we all know that BBC UK iplayer isn’t available in my country). But something just got me wondering: there are some options that can be ticked on or off as you can see from the screenshot below
I just didn’t want to have a headache wondering why I would need to untick those checkboxes, so I left them ticked (my view is simple: most regular users wouldn’t even care about these options, unless they want to go the “advanced mode” way).
Ok, back to BBC iPlayer : the issue was simple: the list of proxy servers does not contain UK country: we have Germany, Netherlands, Russia and Ukraine. I chose the Ukraine-based proxy and inserted BBC iPlayer into the Free Proxy. The good thing is that at least, I didn’t see a lot of pop-up showing-up here and then. But the advertisement takes 1/3 top of the browsing window, so you have to scroll down to see the actual website you are trying to see. And guess what? As expected, I couldn’t watch BBC iPlayer. But anyway, I guess it would work for any country-based limited online service that fall into the list of countries aforementioned. Not sure yet. If anyone has a service that would fit into this criterion, feel free to mention it so that I can test.
But for the heck of testing, I browsed whatismyipaddress.com from the free proxy, and it actually reports me with a Ukraine-based IP address. So at least, I know that the IP address sent to webservers that I reach through this Proxy server isn’t my actual IP address. I played a bit changing the country of the proxy, and Whatismyipaddress.com actually reported the right country. Moreover, by using the “Audit My PC anonymous surfing”, the basic results I received when using the free proxy is satisfying: it doesn’t show my actual GPS location, nor my actual country and IP address.
From what I’ve seen, this Free proxy actually works for changing my IP address, and it is not so cluttered as do other free proxies. However, the limited list of countries where they provide Proxy is a shortcoming so far.
