Businesses are increasingly moving all their operations online to reap the benefits that come with it. Marketing, sales, inventory management, and collaboration are all being done online. Unfortunately, cybercrime is also at an exponential increase as a direct response to most businesses having their operations online. As a result, network security solutions such as VPNs have become a need rather than a choice for businesses.

VPN solutions enable you to create private networks which are insulated from the public internet. In doing so, VPNs help to ensure that only business employees have access to the business network resources and data providing information security and privacy.

Setting up a VPN used to require expensive hardware-based VPN solutions and dedicated personnel for network administration. This used to be difficult for SMBs, but there are many VPN-as-a-Service (VPNaaS) solutions now, that are trying to fix this. But are they all good at it?

UTunnel VPN stands out from the crowd, with its affordable and simple yet flexible VPN solution making VPN server setup and management a breeze.

Limitations of other VPN-as-a-Service Solutions

Most VPNaaS solutions available in the market today come with the following drawbacks:

• High costs for dedicated servers. They require customers to pay at least $50 per month for a cloud VPN server.
• Even when charging so much, there is often no transparency on the server specs or performance.
• Bringing your own on-premise server or cloud VPS is not provided as an option for many solutions.
• Customers are often billed per VPN connection or device, rather than per user.
• Minimum purchase requirements; often starting with a minimum of 5 or 10 licenses bundled (even when you don't need that many).

UTunnel changes the game for all the cases listed above. You can see how below.

UTunnel VPN and Businesses: A Perfect Match

UTunnel VPN establishes itself as a perfect match for SMBs by solving the issues the current VPNaaS providers have, and offering a lot more through its core features. Contrary to other VPN solutions, UTunnel VPN:

• Offers transparent pricing for its services.
• Provides an option of bringing your own server (on-premise or cloud VPS), in addition to the automated cloud VPN deployment option.
• Bills customers per user, not per device or connection. (allows 5 devices per user)
• Less minimum purchase requirements: 1 VPN server and 1 user license.
• Affordable costs for dedicated servers. (starting from $5 per month)

UTunnel VPN is a versatile solution tailored to enable businesses to easily set up a competent VPN solution. It is equipped with an array of flexible networking and robust security features to allow you to efficiently build and manage cloud VPN servers and users in your VPN.

With UTunnel, you require little to no technical knowledge is required to set up a VPN server. In addition, it offers support for multiple VPN protocols and has a streamlined web-based configuration interface to configure server settings and VPN access.

UTunnel VPN is mainly but not exclusively a business VPN solution. It allows anyone who wishes to set up a private VPN to ensure the privacy of their data to do so. UTunnel has an extensive collection of features that make it highly adaptable to your needs.

Let's have an insight into these features below.

Core features of UTunnel VPN

Fully Automated Cloud VPN Deployment.

UTunnel has a Cloud VPN-as-a-Service feature that allows you to automatically deploy a cloud VPN server for your business via a handful of popular cloud providers. These include Linode, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Vultr, Kamatera, and UpCloud.

You only have to choose the preferred cloud provider and data center location, and the server specifications. All of this can be done via easy-to-use dropdowns on the web UI.

Bring Your Own Server(BYOS).

UTunnel allows you to easily set up your On-premise server to host your VPN solution. All you need to have is Ubuntu 20.04 with an IPv4 address installed physically or virtually. Then you can proceed to run a couple of commands to complete the setup.

An on-premise server, in this case, does not necessarily mean a physical server on your business premises. It can be a server you have already set up on the cloud with another cloud provider, such as AWS, Google Cloud, etc.

Easy, On-the-spot configuration.

UTunnel VPN has a graphical web interface to enable you to easily configure your VPN. It does not require you to have any experience with servers or VPNs, just basic computer knowledge is enough.

Suppose you encounter any issues, there are straightforward guidelines available to help you through the whole process. In addition, the UTunnel support team is always happy to offer expert help whenever needed.

Robust security features.

It has strong network security features that complement the whole purpose of investing in a VPN. At the center of these features is 256-bit encryption that ensures that the traffic between your business and its resources is secure, in addition to common security features such as password protection, etc.

Organization Account.

With UTunnel VPN, you can set up an organization account for your business. This account comes with additional features including, an exclusive web portal for your business, allowing you to set up Single Sign-on, and automatic user provisioning. These features let you manage users, teams, and multiple servers easily.

Site-to-Site VPN Tunneling.

The organization account has this site-to-site tunneling feature that allows you to establish a secure connection between main offices and their remote offices.

Flexible logging policy and stats.

By default, your service won't be logging anything until you select it. Enabling logging will give you visibility of the logins and users of your VPN. UTunnel VPN also delivers interactive statistics on how the resources of your server are being utilized.

Easy Custom DNS Configuration.

For business use, you might need to use an external DNS server on your VPN to resolve DNS requests. UTunnel VPN not only allows you to use an external DNS but also easily configure it.

Split Routing.

Of course, your employees will likely browse external sources while connected to the company VPN. UTunnel VPN allows you to enable split routing to ensure only the traffic destined to the pre-configured IP addresses or networks is sent across the VPN. The rest of the Internet traffic will be routed outside the VPN tunnel.

Fair, affordable, and transparent pricing.

Subscriptions are billed per user and not per connection/device. The minimum purchase requirements are 1 VPN server and a single license, no need to pay for additional licenses that you won't need.

They offer credit notes to return the balance invoice amount as credits to customers when they downgrade their VPN accounts or VPN package. You can also cancel the service at any time, no questions asked.

Multi-Platform VPN Client & Apps.

UTunnel VPN has support for the major operating systems including macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. In addition, it adds VPN client applications for all of these to enable a seamless connection to your VPN server.

Through these features, UTunnel goes out of its way to address the issues faced by SMBs when setting up a VPN solution for their business on the cloud. Just like any other solution, UTunnel VPN has its pros and cons, let's analyze them below.

Pros - UTunnel Business VPN

• Easy VPN server deployment without requiring technical skills.
• It has options for deploying your on-a-cloud server or on-premise server (BYOS).
• A variety of cloud providers to choose from including DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Hetzner, and UpCloud with 30+ locations globally.
• Easy site-to-site VPN tunneling.
• UTunnel is listed in the following cloud marketplaces: AWS, Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr. This makes it easy to set up your VPN server using the BYOS option.
• Contrary to its competitors, it has no minimum purchase requirements.

Cons - UTunnel Business VPN

• UTunnel doesn't offer long-term discounted plans. However, it makes up for this with relatively cheap monthly plans.
• UTunnel client applications have all base-level functionalities, but require modifications to be consistent across all platforms.
• It would not be the ideal option if you're looking for anonymity as you will be using a dedicated IP address.

Setting Up and Using a VPN Server using UTunnel

You just need to follow a few simple steps:

#1 Sign up for a UTunnel organization account, log in to the UTunnel web dashboard and click on the Create Server button.

#2 Select the server type (Cloud or On-Premise) and the number of users based on your requirements and then complete the payment.

#3 If you choose the On-Premise option (BYOS), you need to connect to your server via SSH, run a few commands, and register the server.

#4 Invite users to your server and whitelist the server IP to set up controlled resource access. Download UTunnel VPN client apps on your devices to connect to the newly created VPN server.

UTunnel VPN client apps are available for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux.

If you feel this solution has the capacity to meet your business needs, go ahead and safeguard your business right now with UTunnel's flexible VPN solution! Now, may pick the VPN solution pricing plan that best suits your requirements.