Connecting to the Internet from Asia, via the UK?

July 15, 2008 3:17 AM

I have some Internet work that depends on me accessing the Internet from the UK as it involves location-specific search engine results. That's no problem whilst I'm here in London but shortly I'll be making a trip to Asia and would like to carry on working while there. What are my options?

The obvious one is to use a proxy server specified in my Firefox settings, but the problem with this is that the web interface I need to use is quite jazzy, with Javascript and Ajax and so on, and I've had trouble getting these proxies to work with anything but the most basic HTML-only sites. That was just using those free proxies though, perhaps I'd be better off with a premium one?

Another alternative is to leave a computer here in the UK and connect in remotely to it with VNC or something like that. The problem with that is that I only have one computer, my laptop, and it'll be with me in Asia. Is it possible to rent a UK-based virtual (or real) machine of some kind that will allow me to VNC in and launch a browser window from there?

Anyone have any other ideas? Am I overlooking an obvious solution?

posted by uk_giffo to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: The best bet is probably a UK based VPN provider. This will give you a remote dialin secure connection to the UK, and - when connected - as far as everyone else is concerned, you're still in the UK with a UK ISP and IP. As far as your laptop is concerned, you're connected to the internet as normal, and can do everything you usually would - it just might be slightly slower given the extra round trip.

vpntunnel comes recommended by others, but I've not tried it myself. Dedicated IP, £10 a month and no filtering.

vpngates.com is cheaper, but their reliability was in question last I checked.
posted by ArkhanJG at 3:46 AM on July 15, 2008 [1 favorite]

remote desktop solutions might help vnc or rdp on windows
posted by radsqd at 1:12 PM on July 15, 2008