• Remote Access to Home/Office Networks - When not at home or office, your device can still join your home or office network remotely through a PairVPN connection. This will give you access to any internal computers or network resources. See "How do I setup remote access to Home or Office networks" below.
• Bypass geographic restrictions from streaming services - Streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime or most sport channels will restrict your access when you travel outside of US. They are also getting better at blocking most VPN services because their IP addresses are usually shared by multiple users. PairVPN will not have this problem. By connecting to a PairVPN server at home, you will appear to be connecting from home and your usage will not be restricted.
• Protect from snooping on untrustworthy public Internet - The public Internet service your device connects to is able to see your network activities. In the US, Internet services can even legally collect and sell your network activity data. By connecting to a PairVPN server first, your network activities will be encrypted inside a tunnel and can not be viewed by your device's Internet service.
• Bypass network restrictions from your Internet connection - A lot of public Internet will restrict certain type of network activities. For example, school networks may block game sites all together. They will need to snoop your usage first to identify certain activities which can be prevented by PairVPN (see previous usage).
• Secure your network usage over public WiFi - Public WiFi connections may be intercepted and decrypted. When connected to a PairVPN server, the encrypted tunnel is established before sending over WiFi so your data are protected.
• Establish a peer-to-peer tunnel between any two devices on the Internet - PairVPN can form a local network between any two devices on the Internet. By connecting PairVPN the client device can then access the server device using the private IP address assigned.

One of the most typical setup of PairVPN is to pick any phone, tablet or computer at home and make it your VPN server.

On the server device install the PairVPN app and run as server mode. On the connecting device run as client mode, then start the connection with "New Server" selected. It will display a 6 digit pairing code. Enter this code on the server side to complete the pairing. Once paired your client device can connect to the VPN server at home from anywhere.

Your PairVPN server device has the options of restricting the client permissions. If the purpose of your VPN is to access the Internet (not trying to remote access home/office computers), then you should set permissions to "Internet Only" (this is the default). This will prevent access to your local network and is the safest option.

For local network access, we recommend setting the permissions to allow only the devices you need. You can "Whitelisted IP" with the IP address of that computer only.

There is also an optional "password" you can set on the server side. It is optional because only paired device can connect to your server device so it is already very safe. However in case other people have access to the client device, setting a password will prevent unauthorized connection.

Security and privacy are our highest priorities when designing PairVPN. Please see our privacy policy for details.

Unlike traditional VPN servers, PairVPN does not listen on an incoming port. So your firewall will not be changed. This is not only more convenient, but also more secure.

A traditional VPN server has to expose itself to the whole Internet at all time, through a public IP address and a TCP/UDP port opened in firewall. Anyone on the Internet can connect to the VPN server and attempt logins. PairVPN eliminate this problem using the pairing model.

When activated, a PairVPN server will register itself with our gate-keeping server, which only allows a paired client to get in touch with the VPN server. Then there is a second layer of security, the client need to have the server's security key in order to successfully connect. Since non of our servers have this security key, it makes sure that even if data breaches occur, your VPN server will not be compromised.

PairVPN is mainly designed for personal use. It only allows one connection at a time, although you can set up pairings from multiple client devices to the same server.

While PairVPN can secure/hide network activities of the client device from its Internet service, we wouldn't recomend using it for torrent downloads. That is because in the end the torrent usages will still be originated out of your server device and not hidden from its Internet service.

Simply find a device or computer located in the Home/Office network and run PairVPN on it in server mode. You can set the permissions to "Local Only" so that the client device will have access to any local computers (however we recommend narrowing down permissions to particular computers you need to access, using the "whitelisted IPs" permission).

The connected device will then be able to access any local network resources, such as shared network folders, database servers, exchange servers, or any other server devices. For example, you can connect to any internal computer that runs Remote Desktop Server (Windows), Screen Sharing (Mac) or VNC server for desktop-sharing access.

In most cases, a direct network connection will be established between the client device and the server device. So your bandwidth throughput will be decided by the slower Internet of the two. Also, for every byte the client device downloads, the server device will incur twice the bandwidth usages (download from the Internet first then pass to the client).

In some cases, a direct connection is not possible due to symmetric NAT, then your connection will be routed through one of our relay servers. In those cases downloads will go through the VPN server device first, relay server second, and then the client device last. This could add more latency to your connection.