Hideman is a straightforward VPN service which can quickly allocate you an IP address from several countries (Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Netherlands, Panama, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, UK, US), helping you to bypass location-based content restrictions and preserving your privacy online.

The program can be used for free: just launch it, click Connect and you'll be given a free hour. You won't always have the option to choose your location (we were initially allocated a server in Germany, although later we had the option to choose a server in a supported country), but otherwise the system behaved well, and for instance we didn't notice any significant drop in performance (although apparently free connections may be speed-limited at peak times).

Need more time? You can have up to 4 hours a week, and just clicking the Payment tab, then selecting "Free hour" will extend your anonymity for just a little longer.

If that's still not enough, though, you can always opt for one of the paid plans. There's a lot of choice: $3 for 1 week, $9 for a month, $15 for two months, $39 for 6 months, $69 for a year: it's your call. Simply click the Payment tab, choose the plan you require and you can pay from within the Hideman client.