Fix Bandwidth Exceeded in Hotspot Shield

Hotspot Shield is probably the only working free VPN solution that enables users from all over the world to access websites that provide their contents only to visitors from the United States. The software can be used to hear Pandora radio or watch tv at websites like Hulu (who seem to have banned the IPs of Hotspot Shield). The free version of Hotspot Shield has the disadvantage that is has a 3 Gigabyte transfer limit per month and that a connection cannot be established once the transfer limit has been reached.

While three Gigabytes is a lot of bytes when surfing the Internet it’s not enough if you regularly watch movies or hear radio which have much higher bandwidth demands than normal websites. Hotspot Shield does not require user accounts which means that they must have different means to track user bandwidth. Two possibilities are the IP address of the user and / or the MAC address of his network adapter.

Raymond already conducted some research on his own and he discovered that the Mac address is being used by Hotspot Shield to keep track of the bandwidth usage. The only thing left to do would be to change the MAC address to another one which would basically mean that the counter would be reset to 0 again and that the user could use another 3 Gigabytes with Hotspot Shield.

The easiest way to do that is a software called Mac MakeUP. Just install the software, select your network card, click on the Generate Random button, select completely random mac and click on the Change button. Et voila the MAC address has been changed. Reconnect to Hotspot Shield and you should be able to connect normally and use the service as usual.