Productivity Sauce

In this day and age, there is no need to explain the benefits of using VPN. And while you can manage your own VPN installation, opting for an existing service makes more sense in most situations. The question is, of course, which service to choose. There are plenty of paid high-quality VPN services on the market, but if you only occasionally need to use VPN, paying a monthly fee is probably a waste of money. Enter VPN Gate, an academic project maintained by the University of Tsukuba, Japan.

Unlike a typical VPN service, the project offers several things. The key among them is the SoftEther VPN open source VPN software that you can download and deploy on your own server. If that's not your cup of tea, you'll be pleased to learn that the project also maintains a list of active VPN servers. Pick the one you like, and use its settings to configure a VPN connection on your machine. A word of cauton: since all VPN servers listed on the VPN Gate page are maintained by unverified third parties, you should treat them as such.