The traffic is encrypted as well which makes it unlikely that someone is able to spy on it including your ISP. I have been writing about Relakks before and they had some serious troubles with their service at the beginning which turned off many users who tried the service initially.

This has changed to the better. I was able to connect and use the service whenever I wanted in the last weeks and had no troubles whatsoever with slow speeds or unreachable hosts. The connection is stable and fast enough for everyones needs. I was able to surf, use emule to try the p2p capabilities, listen to Internet radio and download from the Usenet at the same time without problems.

The maximum speeds are a little bit lower than what I used to get without Relakks. Everyone has to make the decision for himself if the extra bit of security and privacy is worth the slower speed. Slow meant for instance that my Usenet downloads were capped at about 8-10 Mbit instead of the usual 16 Mbit.

Not a big problem for me though. It has to be noted that Relakks is not a free service. It is possible to either purchase a monthly account for 5 Euro or a yearly for 50 Euro. I’m currently trying the monthly account and will switch to the yearly one once it expires.

I decided to try it out once again and was able to sign up again with their service. You have to configure a new VPN connection in your operating system which is explained in the faq section of their website. Details are provided for Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X. Even beginners should be able to create a VPN connection this way. You can now choose to automatically use Relakks whenever you connect to the Internet or manually activate the service, I decided to use it manually but it does not make a difference as long as the service is running.

I suggest to check your IP if you are really connected through the VPN before you do any other activity on the Internet. Let us talk about speeds. Web surfing does not seem to be limited at all by Relakks, everything works fine and fast as usual. I was able to retrieve emails using Thunderbird as well, Winamp streams are working and streaming video on sites like Youtube looks usual.

I decided that it was now time to stress test the connection and see how fast I could go with it. What can I say: Speeds vary a lot. I was not able to maximize my 16 Mbit connection which is no problem usually, the most I got from Relakks was 11 Mbit which is fine but not great. I was able to connect to Giganews and Bittorrent without problems.

It remains to be seen if the service will continue to function this way or if the servers will again go down if to many users sign up for the service. I will keep an eye on it for the next seven days and let you know if I was able to see any changes.

I would sign up with them if that is of interest to any of you. Let me know.