Gom Solves Blocked Sites, for Less Than Half a Starbucks

Gom Solves Blocked Sites, for Less Than Half a Starbucks

Gom is a fast VPN to solve blocked sites problems and it does it’s job so well that it claims to speed you up, instead of slowing you down. Also, they are a made in Singapore tech company. Gom originally stood for “Go Away MDA”, as a sign of protest against MDA censorship of certain questionable content websites. And perhaps, more importantly, unlike traditional VPNs, Gom helps you unblock websites in just 1 click.

But Gom has grown.

Gom is now a full blown configuration-free unblocking app that will also work for other countries with internet censorship. So apps like Netflix, Hulu can all be enabled through Gom. They are available on the following platforms: Chrome / Firefox / Android / iOS.

Gom says that their servers are hosted on 1000 mbit (or 1 Gbps) internet, and encryption is 100% mandated on Gom’s traffic. Encryption also helps to compress traffic, and therefore making it faster to send over the internet. In terms of growth, Steven, co-founder of Gom shared on a Reddit and HWZ AMA that they had seen a growth of 30k active users to 150k active users. That’s positive, considering that they do charge for the service.

In terms of the tech deployment, they use some interesting technology as compared to traditional VPN. For example, HTTP2/SPDY SSL proxies are enabled through the chrome plugin. That means asynchronous page loading with enforced encryption even on non-SSL sites. On the server side, QUIC intra-server communication help reduce communications from 7 to 2 hops. All this make them faster than a traditional VPN construct.

Pricing

They currently charge $2.99 / month and their Gom service can be activated on the following platforms. Or if you really want to support them, there’s a $149 / one time fee, which is around 4-5 years worth of subscription fees. There will be a free ad-supported version which would be launch soon. That could be a good alternative to other free services such as Hola Unblocker.

That’s indeed cheaper than half a Starbucks, which might be good for an afternoon but this will get you a month worth of access to premium content such as Netflix, Hulu, services such as Google Voice or yes, porn. From the list of channel addons listed on Getgom websites, I sported a few questionable websites.

Nonetheless, they are cheaper than a traditional VPN, or even a DNS service, and best of all, it’s much easier to activate.

4 Replies to “Gom Solves Blocked Sites, for Less Than Half a Starbucks”

    1. Not too good now – not sure if their servers are getting hit.

      Speed test results

      • with Gom – 0.85 Mbps D/L, 0.16 Mbps U/L Ping 602 ms.
      • without Gom – 69.78 Mbps D/L 89 Mbps U/L Ping 11 ms

      However, test was done with a Singapore server, which might reduce the speed.
      Also tested Hola, not able to browse via mobile website with Gom as Hola detects an anonymous proxy is in use.