Given the events of the last year there aren’t too many people that doubt the need for online privacy anymore. The popularity of VPN and proxy services are on the rise. One provider that’s growing quickly is Hotspot Shield. They recently surpassed 200 million downloads. While they offer a premium service called Hotspot Shield Elite I’m sure a large majority of their downloads came from the free ad-supported version available on their site.
I’m not personally a fan of ad-supported VPN services. In general they are too limited and the advertisements are annoying. They open up additional browser tabs and include video ads that auto start. I can do without all that. However, their Hotspot Shield Elite service is much better. For $29.99 a year you can access servers in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. At better speeds and without any annoying advertisements.
Cheers to the AnchorFree team on their latest accomplishment. We look forward to the continued growth of Hotspot Shield. Both the free and premium versions. Speaking of growth here are some related stats:
- Growing by more than nine million new downloads per month
- The No. 1 security and privacy app on iPhone® and iPad® devices. The app now protects and keeps private more than 350,000 social media messages and 50,000 emails every hour.
- Hotspot Shield has seen triple-digit mobile growth in the past 12 months and has been installed by 21 million smartphone users to date.
At their current pace we’ll be writing a post to celebrate 300 million downloads before the end of the year.
