Do you want greater anonymity online, the ability to bypass annoying geo-restrictions, and a way to get around local censorship? Proxy servers act as an intermediary between you and the Internet, effectively hiding your IP address and disguising your physical location. All you need to manually set up a proxy connection is a suitable proxy server.

And there are a lot of these, many of which are free. Unfortunately, their reliability and speeds do vary. For that reason, we continuously check thousands of proxy servers. You can see all of the servers that we were able to connect above in a list that we constantly update.

Our list also includes the following information:

How you'll set up a proxy depends mainly on your browser or operating system. In general, you'll need to look for proxy options under settings. After finding them, you can manually input the proxy's IP address and port number from our list.

For Windows, open Settings and head to Network and Internet > Proxy > Manual Proxy Setup > Use a Proxy Server.

On macOS, navigate to System Preferences > Network, select the network where you want to create a proxy and click Advanced > Proxies.

Whether you use Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS, we've created a step-by-step guide with screenshots to make things easier.

Manually configured proxy servers aren't the only way to hide your IP address. Depending on what it is you'd like to do, these options might actually better match your needs:

If safety and security are at the top of your priority list and you're interested in completely encrypting your Internet connection, VPNs are the best choice. Like proxy servers, virtual private networks act as an intermediary between your device and the Internet, however, thanks to their state-of-the-art encryption standards, they also provide comprehensive protection.

Another advantage is that you'll connect to your VPN through user-friendly apps, requiring only a few clicks to digitally jump to your new location. Once established, connections cover all applications on your device that use the Internet regardless of their proxy or protocol settings.

VPNs are especially useful if you:

• Want to protect again cyber attacks, such as those launched over public WiFi
• Intend to regularly change your digital location to stream content from abroad
• Have an interest in directing lots of simultaneous traffic through a secure connection

There are plenty of services to choose from. We thoroughly reviewed 27 VPNs, crowning NordVPN as our overall winner. The Panama-based provider combines performance, security, and breadth of features in an excellent package. Particularly if signing on for a longer period of time, their rates are also very reasonable.

In case you just need a fast proxy connection for a specific website, like a page that's blocked in your geographic location, a web proxy can come in handy. These are online services that allow users to create an HTTP proxy connection for directly accessing a specific URL in their browser.

You won't need to manually set anything up, however, performance can be limited owing to the limited number of server locations. As a result, web proxies are not ideal for video streaming. For the security-minded user, there's another issue: Web proxies only use HTTP.

Web proxies are usually free. To help find the best option, we assessed seven popular services.

In the event that you don't want to use a web proxy's website to create a proxy connection, you can install a browser extension that does this. There are plenty of free options, like CyberGhost, a VPN provider:

With proxy extensions, you can establish a proxy connection for HTTP traffic directly in your browser. This offers a slightly more convenient solution than web proxies, however, they do suffer from the same disadvantages (server locations and performance).

We took a closer look at the best browser-based proxy options for both Chrome and Firefox.

We've also prepared a comprehensive guide for all of the alternatives to proxy servers.