How to get a Finnish IP address
The easiest way to improve your digital privacy is to switch your IP address using a VPN. We’ll …
There’s no shortage of threats online. To help you protect yourself, we’ve created a guide to getting an Australian IP address with a VPN. This way, you can enhance your digital privacy and securely access your usual Australian content from anywhere, even abroad.
How to get an Australian IP address in five easy steps
- Start by signing up for a Hotspot Shield Premium or the Premium Family plan
- Install the Hotspot Shield app onto any device you use regularly
- Open the app, log in, and select one of the available Australian servers
- Wait a moment while your device connects to the chosen server
- Now, simply use the internet as normal. Your traffic is encrypted, your true IP address is kept private, and your online activities are hidden from anyone who might be watching
How can using a VPN in Australia benefit you?
Your online activities aren’t private. Your Internet Service Provider can see every website you visit, as can the owner of any hotspot you use. VPNs prevent any observers from seeing what you get up to online by encrypting your internet traffic, making it unreadable to anyone without the (effectively impossible to guess) decryption key.
VPNs are also helpful for removing roadblocks that stop you from accessing your usual content. Once connected to an Australian server, you’ll be able to securely access all of your favorite Australia-only services, and will no longer find certain content blocked on public wifi networks.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to become a victim of cybercrime. In fact, between June 2020 and June 2021, Australians reported a cyber attack every eight minutes on average. Part of the problem is that as criminals adopt more sophisticated methods of attack, it’s increasingly difficult to account for every angle they might use to take advantage of you.
Hotspot Shield not only conceals your activities and prevents personal information from leaking out, it also protects against malware. This helps prevent you from accidentally installing viruses, entering your details on phishing sites, or being infected by legitimate websites that have themselves been compromised. This feature is no afterthought, either. Hotspot Shield is currently blocking over three million suspicious websites and adding more on a regular basis.
Which Australian server is best for you?
Generally speaking, the closer you are to your chosen VPN server, the faster and more stable your connection will be. Of course, Australia is quite a large country, which it’s why it’s so important that you’re able to choose from multiple locations.
Hotspot Shield currently has servers in five Australian cities:
- Adelaide
- Brisbane
- Melbourne
- Perth
- Sydney
If you’re centrally located or just want to get online as quickly as possible, you can just choose our “Australia” location. This will automatically connect you to the best available server.
Here’s why Hotspot Shield is the best VPN for Australia
Every VPN has different capabilities. Some don’t allow P2P traffic, for instance, while others only let you choose a country to connect to, instead of a specific city. You may find yourself trying servers at random, hoping to find one that isn’t blocked by your favorite streaming service.
We believe in making things as simple as possible. You can torrent as much as you want, using any server you like. If you’d prefer to stream, we have specially-configured servers designed to securely access the most popular platforms. Plus, Hotspot Shield works in countries like China and the UAE, which block most other VPNs outright.
Fast and reliable Australian VPN servers
Your connection speed impacts everything you do online, which is why it’s so important to find a quick, reliable VPN with as small an impact as possible. We’ve invested huge amounts of effort into minimizing speed loss, from optimizing our network behind-the-scenes to providing multiple Australian locations so that you never have to rely on a server that’s too far away.
Hotspot Shield also has a secret weapon – a proprietary protocol called Hydra. This was custom-built with speed in mind, and has been proven significantly faster than OpenVPN, over both short and long distances. Further, multiple third-party auditors and experts have found that Hotspot Shield outperforms all of its rivals. Ookla, the world’s most popular speed testing service, found that our service was 2.2x faster than the VPN in second place.
How to stream Australian TV with a VPN
You may have noticed that certain sites are blocked on public Wi-Fi hotspots. Not only are you compromising on security by using the network, but your activities can be restricted based on the whims of the office, hotel, cafe, or airport you’re at.
This kind of web-blocking fails the moment you connect to a VPN, since the network can no longer see what websites you’re trying to access. In other words, a VPN gives you the freedom to securely stream 9Now, Stan, Kayo Sports, and more from anywhere in the world.
How to get a new IP address in Australia (or anywhere else)
Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting an Australian IP address with Hotspot Shield:
- Start by opening up the Hotspot Shield app
- Click on the arrow in the Virtual location box to open the server list
- Next, type “Australia” (without the quotation marks) or scroll down until you see Australia in the list.
- Click on it, and you’ll be asked to select your preferred Australian server location. Alternatively, you can select the first option to be connected to the best-available server. Just hover over a city and click the Connect button on the right-hand side of the screen.
- The app will now try to connect you. If successful, you’ll be shown a dashboard screen with lots of useful information, including your fastest connection speed, your total daily bandwidth usage, and how long you’ve been connected for.
- Congratulations – you’re now browsing the web with an Australian IP address! What’s more, your connection is secured using Hotspot Shield’s powerful encryption, meaning your data can’t be read by hackers, hotspot owners, or your Internet Service Provider.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use Hotspot Shield’s free VPN plan to access Australian streaming services?
Hotspot Shield’s free plan is great for general web browsing, but it only allows you to access US servers, so it’s not suitable for streaming Australian TV. There’s also a 500MB daily limit, which means you’d only be able to watch around half an hour of standard-definition video.
Hotspot Shield includes a risk-free 45-day money-back guarantee, meaning you can always try it out and see if it’s right for you before deciding.
What can I watch with an Australian VPN?
Lots of popular streaming platforms check to see if you have an Australian IP address before they’ll let you watch anything. Here’s a short list of services you’ll be able to access using a VPN server in Australia:
Do I need a VPN if I live in Australia?
Realistically, everyone could benefit from extra online security. After all, cybercriminals don’t care where you live as long as they can take your data or your money. That said, an extra layer of protection never hurts. Given that Australia is a member of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance, (a group of countries that all share citizens’ information with each other) it’s a good idea for anyone who lives there to use a VPN as much as possible. After all, once you connect, your activities are hidden from everyone, even your internet service provider.
What else can a VPN do for you?
VPNs might be best known for their privacy-enhancing qualities, but they can help you in several other ways as well. Once connected, you’ll be able to torrent anonymously, use public wifi without your favorite websites being blocked, and securely access your online banking service while out and about.
With the industry increasingly focused on protecting you from malware, phishing attempts, and trackers, as well as traditional online threats (like Man-in-the-Middle or denial of service attacks), the right VPN can greatly simplify the process of staying safe online.
