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Updates - DNS redirection service

browngeek

— 3 min read
Since last week, when I started looking into which DNS redirection service to move to, if at all, from Unblock-us (note, referral link), I have been doing a bit more research on the services I had previously listed.I have been using Unblock-us for a few years, and honestly, overall the service has been very good.  I had set it up on on my router, and pretty much forgot about it.  A few minor hiccups over the years, but nothing major.For information, Unblock-us charges about US$5 a month for its service.  It works pretty well with both US and UK sites.  From Hong Kong however, I have to say, often, UK specific sites can be quite slow.  No such problems with US sites though.  Unblock-us helpfully has a list of supported and unsupported sites.  One of the reasons for me looking at alternative operators was lack of VPN with Unblock-us.  Via Twitter they have confirmed they will be offering VPN, but have not provided an ETA:
Here is some information on the other DNS sites.  I haven’t tried them yet myself, but as all of them offer free trial periods, once my Unblock-us subscription is over at the end of the year, I will try them all and then decide which one is best for me.Unotelly (note, referral link)Unotelly offer both DNS redirection and VPN.  Their charges are as follows:- DNS only US$4.95 a month or US$47.88 a year (US$3.99 a month)- DNS and VPN US$7.95 a month or US$59.88 a year (US$4.99 a month).From reading around it seems Unotelly offer PPTP VPN to the USA and the UK.

Unotelly offers several servers around the world which, according to Unotelly means “The benefit of server clusters is multiple redundancy which guarantees UnoTelly's service stability so you won't experience any downtime due to UnoTelly server issues”.  A list of supported sites is here: http://www.unotelly.com/unodns/channels (mainly US and UK streaming sites).

Feedback from a few people using Unotelly is that sometimes some of the sites are slow, but overall it performs well and reliability is pretty good.

OverplayAgain, Overplay offers both DNS redirection and VPN.  Their charges are as follows:- DNS only US$4.95 a month- DNS and VPN US$9.95 a month(I am not sure if Overplay offer yearly subscriptions, but am looking into it).While Overplay is more expensive than Unotelly, Overplay offers VPN in 48 different locations with a range of protocols including PPTP, L2TP and OpenVPN.  There is no indication as to what sites are supported by the DNS service, but from reports it is mainly US and UK streaming sites.Feedback I have had from some people is that Overplay offers some good services, but sometimes they just stop workingGetUSAWebsitesThis offers just DNS redirection.  The site has two plans, a basis and a deluxe plan.  Their charges are as follows:- Basic plan US$4.99 a month- Deluxe plan US$7.99 a month The deluxe plan has availability for more sites than the basic plan (including Dish Network, which for example is not available with Unblock-us).  A full list of sites is available you can use with GetUSAWebsites is available here: http://www.getusawebsites.com/unlocked-websites/.  The service seems to be geared more towards US sites (hence the name).PlaymoLike Unblock-us and GetUSAWebsites, Playmo only offers DNS redirection.  This service seems to be quite new, it was in beta testing from October 2011 and went live as a subscription service around April this year.  Their charges are as follows:- US$4.99 a month- US$13.99 for 3 months (US$4.66 a month)- US$25.99 for 6 months (US$4.33 a month)- US$49.99 for 12 months (US$4.16 a month)A list of supported streaming sites can be found here: http://playmo.tv/watch/.  The list does seem to be much more limited than the other services available, but they do say that many more supported sites will be “coming soon”. At present, like I have already said, I am leaning towards Unotelly because for US$50 a year I can get both a DNS redirection service and basic VPN thrown in.  However, I will only know which service performs the best once I have had a chance to try all the above services out first.

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