N.B. Some links in this article are affiliate links, and I may receive a commission for purchases made at no extra cost to you.

Cyprus is a beautiful country, with great climate almost year round, great food and friendly, gentle people. It’s one of my personal favorite places to go, and has a strong British ex-pat presence in particular. Cities like Limassol, Paphos, and Ayia Napa are really popular tourist spots as well.

This being the case, there are lots of people who visit Cyprus every year who could use a VPN service that offers IP addresses there to keep online browsing secure, especially in public places, and also to access websites that might be geo-restricted.

Thankfully, there are a couple of free VPN services here that do have servers in Cyprus, though they do have limitations, whether with data use or privacy. However, I’ll run though the main free VPN options I could find for Cyprus – PrivateVPN, Tunnelbear Free and UrbanVPN – before moving onto some unlimited, Premium VPN options that you’ll realistically need for longer term stays on the island.

Free Option #1 – PrivateVPN 7 Day Trial

I’ve updated this post to include this, it’s a good option to at least try out a fully legit, unlimited VPN with a server in Cyprus for free.

PrivateVPN are a Swedish based provider who’s main focus is on their Premium version, but they do offer a limited free trial of their product:

Visit PrivateVPN’s free trial page here. Email their support at [email protected] to receive a gift code to activate a 7 day free trial of the full service.

Here are some good features of PrivateVPN:

• 200 high speed servers in 63 countries (including Cyprus – Nicosia)
• Unlimited server use
• Based in Sweden with strong privacy and consumer protection laws.
• No nonsense, user friendly interface.
• Also despite the cheap price, has an excellent reputation for accessing streaming services.

And also if you decide to upgrade to their Premium version, here are some benefits:

• 36 month plans currently at $1.61/month (effectively 12 months + 24 extra months free). The best long term value on the market.
• 30 day money back guarantee.

For sure it’s only a temporary free trial, but it will give you a good look at how a proper VPN service works, plus their paid plans are the best value on the VPN market. Give them a try and see what you think.

Free Option #2 – Tunnelbear Free Version

We’ll start off with the excellent Tunnelbear VPN service, who do have a free version of their product and also a server in Limassol, Cyprus – perfect!

Click here to visit Tunnelbear’s site. Click the Tunnelbear logo on the top left to go back to the homepage, and click on “Plans”. If you sign up for the Free account, you get 500 MB of data to use each month.

The Free plan is buried away somewhat in the menus and not heavily promoted, as for obvious reasons, they’d prefer customers used paid plans, but you can still find it by clicking back to the homepage and finding the Plans page.

Tunnelbear’s got servers in 49 countries, including in Cyprus (Limassol), so it can be a great option for short term/basic usage. I tested the Cyprus server from my location in the UK, and it did work, although with slow page load speeds. This is probably because of the distance though, and you’ll likely get much better performance using it from within Cyprus, or at least from much closer.

It also feels and works like a proper, secure VPN service, with your own IP and no data logging, unlike some other shared VPN services that I’d never use to enter personal data on.

However, with the free version, you only get 500 MB of data to use per month. You can tweet at them for an extra 1 GB, but this is your main limitation with this service – you don’t get much data/bandwidth to use. Once you open the interface, there is a data counter so you can see how you’ve got left this month.

For clarity, here’s a quick summary of what you can expect different activities to use in terms of data, given the 500 MB monthly cap with Tunnelbear:

• Basic browsing – Doesn’t use much – 10-20 MB per hour.
• Social media – Uses a bit more – 100-150 MB per hour.
• Multiplayer Online gaming – 50-60 MB per hour.
• YouTube Video (10 minutes):
  • • 480p – 80 MB
    • 720p (HD) – 250 MB
• YouTube video (1 hour)
  • • 480p – 500-700 MB
    • 720p (HD) – 1.5-2 GB
    • You can change YouTube video quality using the settings cog in the bottom right of videos.
• Netflix movie
  • • SD – 700 MB per hour.
    • HD – 3 GB per hour
    • Ultra HD – 7 GB per hour
    • See here for source plus how to change Netflix data usage settings.

Here’s what you could realistically do with the Tunnelbear free version:

• Perfect for short term holiday use (eg. 1-2 weeks or less in Cyprus), just logging into your emails once or twice a day, making purchases etc. Any more than 1 week away you might need a Premium service (see last section).
• Very light, basic browsing (emails, shopping, directions, news etc), but you will see your 500 MB/month quote drain quickly – just 16/17 MB per day for a month.
• Anything where you really need a secure connection – making payments, logging into sensitive accounts, entering any other personal information – I’d use the Tunnelbear VPN and not a shared VPN like UrbanVPN we’ll cover below.
• You can use it to keep your connection secure whilst signing up for an unlimited, Premium VPN service that’ll serve you better long term (see section at the bottom).

Here’s what you can’t really use Tunnelbear free for:

• Videos/streaming services/YouTube – uses too much data as indicated above. You’ll run out of your allowance very quickly
• Social media – might get away with a really small amount, but again it can use up more than you might think.

Overall, Tunnelbear’s free version is an excellent, credible starting point to get an IP address in Cyprus and a secure connection whilst there. The data limit is the big downside, but you can complement it with our next option below, or go for a Premium service if you need one.

Free Option #3 – UrbanVPN

Now let’s move to the second major free Cyprus VPN option I could find, that almost like an inverse of the Tunnelbear service in terms of pro’s/cons – it’s got unlimited use, but the server speeds/reliability and privacy are not as good.

UrbanVPN pride themselves on being a totally free, peer to peer VPN service, using the connections of users to re-route traffic. It’s like the users are each acting as VPN’s for the other users, almost like a crowd-funded VPN service.

They’ve got servers in 80+ countries at present, including in Cyprus, an use of all these servers is unlimited and free.

Click here to get started with UrbanVPN

Here are the main benefits of UrbanVPN:

• Totally free to use
• No need to set up any account or provide any details – just download the program/app and get started.
• Totally free and unlimited server use.
• Available for all major browsers, devices and operating systems.
• Has a server in Cyprus.

But unfortunately, there are some negatives to the service:

• There are some reviews that report slow and unreliable servers (unfortunately, this is to be expected on free services)
• An ambiguous privacy policy that doesn’t make it exactly clear how your data is collected, used or stored.
• Zero customer support if the service goes down or you have difficulties (again to be expected with a free service)
• It’s just difficult to know exactly how secure your data is, or where it’s going. Ultimately, security and privacy and too much up-in-the-air with a peer to peer service like this. It’s the same reason I don’t use the Opera browser VPN for logging into really important accounts – I don’t like using generic shared IP address proxies/VPN’s, even if they claim to be “VPN’s”. You don’t know where your data is going, and they don’t offer the same level of security and privacy as a Premium VPN.

UrbanVPN is definitely NOT a 100% confidential, zero logs VPN:

However, that doesn’t actually matter to a lot of users. If privacy is not your main concern, and you just want a VPN with servers in a certain country to access certain websites, then UrbanVPN can do that for you. Just be prepared to have your personal data collected in a way it won’t be if you sign up to a Premium VPN with a no logs policy (see below).

Here’s what UrbanVPN could be good for:

• Video streaming on sites like YouTube (because bandwidth is unlimited), as long as your connection is good enough for it.
• Possibly logging into streaming services that require a Cyprus IP address, provided you are happy entering login details on a shared/P2P VPN. However, be aware that these free, shared VPN services RARELY work for unlocking major streaming sites like Netflix or Disney Plus. Even some Premium VPNs struggle to consistently do this, so free VPN’s have even less chance.
• Social media account possibly, again if you’re OK with this. Personally I’d only do this if my passwords for these accounts wasn’t used for any other account.

In this way, you could use both Tunnelbear and UrbanVPN to complement each other – use Tunnelbear for really security-essential stuff like logging into serious accounts and making purchases, and just use UrbanVPN for more bandwidth heavy things like streaming, and possibly logging into less serious accounts like YouTube or streaming services (at your own discretion).

Whatever you’re doing, just be aware of the privacy policy, and that your personal data and browsing history can still be collected whilst using the UrbanVPN service.

With VPN’s though, you always get what you pay for, and free services are always going to be restricted and restrictive, whether it’s with data use (Tunnelbear) or reliability and privacy (UrbanVPN).

To get a proper, unlimited, fully secure VPN service, where you know your connection is going to be fast, unlimited and reliable, and your personal data is going to be safe and private, you need to pay for a Premium service.

VPNs That Don’t Have Free Servers in Cyprus

Let’s clear up some of the inaccurate information that’s currently showing up in search results for “free” VPN’s with servers in Cyprus. We’ll quickly list some VPN services that are showing up on the first fews page, but don’t meet this criteria, or have significant catches:

• NordVPN – Are an excellent VPN provider, but they don’t have any free servers at all. They do have a Cyprus server, but you need to pay for all their plans.
• ExpressVPN – Same as NordVPN – no free servers at all. They do have a Cyprus server, but all plans are paid.
• ProtonVPN – Another reputable provider, but their free version only has servers in the USA, Netherlands, Japan. You need their paid plans for Cyprus servers.
• VAP LAT – Does appear legit, but is only available for Android/iOS (App)

Some Premium VPN Services With Servers In Cyprus

If you are going to be in Cyprus longer term (many expats spend their winters there because of the good climate), then you are realistically going to need a Premium VPN for staying safe online.

These all come with fast, reliable servers, unlimited use and zero-logs, meaning your privacy is more protected than with using a shared VPN/proxy service. They are also much more likely (though not certain) to allow you to access geo-restricted streaming services like Netflix, that will almost always be blocked if you try and use a free VPN.

Despite Cyprus being a small island with less than a million residents, many Premium VPN services still offer servers there. We’ve listed some below for you to compare and contrast.

Comparison of VPN’s With Cyprus Servers (links are affiliate links)

Provider	Price (12 months paid in advance)	Number of servers in Cyprus	Number of Devices Allowed	Main Benefits
Private Internet Access	$3.33/month	1 (Nicosia)*	10	Review here
ExpressVPN	$8.32/month	1	5	Country/location choice
NordVPN	$5/month	14	6	Double Encryption & Server Choice
Le VPN	$4.95/month	1	5	Lots of countries
ProtonVPN	$5.99/month	1 (Limassol)	10	Reputable brand

*Uses a geo-located server, meaning that the exit node is located in Cyprus, but traffic is routed through a server in Romania instead.

Bottom line – Private Internet Access (PIA) has it covered for cost (but it’s a geo-located server), NordVPN has it covered for server choice within Cyprus (14+). ProtonVPN is the best for the number of devices/simultaneous connections allowed (10). But are all great, reliable, unlimited VPN services, where you know your connection is going to be secure, and there’s someone to help you if something goes wrong. If I were staying in Cyprus long term, I’d get a Premium plan.

Signing up for a VPN is usually very easy. You simply visit their site (click on one of our links above for each provider), sign up, pay your subscription, download their product and boot up the program.

Once running you simply select a preferred server location and open the VPN connection. You now have a secure, encrypted connection that will keep all your browsing and personal data safe over public Wi-Fi networks.