HotSpotVPN.com, a virtual private networking service provider with individual accounts, has added three regional VPN clusters: I had a chance to meet the company's founder, Glynn Taylor, during a spin through Seattle that he made on the rainiest day in history here (5.01 inches in 24 hours). Needless to say, his broughams got soaked.
Taylor's model is to offer a very inexpensive VPN connection -- $8.88 per month -- for the millions of business travels who don't have the luxury of a corporate-operated VPN service back to their network. HotSpotVPN.com uses the PPTP standard, and allows a fully secure encrypted connection between any PPTP client-equipped computer or handheld and their servers.
The addition of three clusters in California, Florida, and Virginia, on top of their existing Washington, D.C., servers, means that traffic should run even faster for existing and new clients closer in Internet topology to those areas.
(Full disclosure: HotSpotVPN.com has been an advertiser in the past. I'm a big fan of this services model, however, and I expect that Taylor will face more competition as he moves forward.)