Pornhub Launches Free VPN That’s Totally Not Exclusively for Porn

VPNs are an important part of preserving your privacy on the internet in this day and age, but they can also be used to access content that is blocked on your network. However, you need to trust a VPN provider that routes all your web traffic. There are plenty of well-known providers, and now you can add Pornhub to the list. Yes, the adult streaming site has its own VPN service, but it does have a somewhat questionable track record of keeping your secrets.

Pornhub says its new VPNhub service is designed to keep your online activity safe from prying eyes and censorship. With a VPN connection, all your traffic is encrypted and routed to the VPN’s servers. The connection then heads off to the actual destination. To an outside observer, all they see is all your traffic going to and from a VPN server. Pornhub claims VPNhub will have 1,000 servers located in 15 countries, and it won’t keep any logs of your activity.

Pornhub affirms its commitment to privacy, but its parent company has had a few embarrassing security snafus. The YouPorn and Digital Playground sites leaked user data in 2012, and the Brazzers forum was hacked and lost control of account details in 2016.

VPNhub is free and unlimited — sort of. You can use it for free, but there are technically some limits on the unlimited service. While VPNhub works on Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS, you can only use it free on mobile devices. Pornhub says the vast majority of its 90 million daily users are on mobile, so that’s where it’s focusing.

If you choose to use the free service, you won’t have access to servers in all 15 countries — right now it appears only the US server in Los Angeles are open access. The app itself also contains ads if you just use the free version. Your bandwidth on the free tier is limited as well. The free connection still seems more than good enough in my testing. The free server is giving me about 30Mbps and the ping is around 100ms. So, those are the limits on this “unlimited” VPN service, but presumably you can use as much bandwidth as you want each month.

Should you decide to pay for the premium tier, you get an ad-free experience, more servers, higher speeds, and access to VPNhub on desktop systems. Premium service costs $11.99 per month if paid month-by-month or you can pay $6.25 per month if you buy a year all at once ($74.99). There’s a one-week free trial of premium if you’re on the fence.