As our new Premium feature we would like to introduce our SOCKS-Proxy.

The SOCKS protocol is a robust and versatile which is located as an intermediate layer by the TCP/IP reference model, just between the Transport and Application layer. There is no limitation to the number of applications / protocols which can use the SOCKS proxy .

We have linked our SOCKS-Proxy with the VPN connection for the following reasons: hide.me stands for security and this security is not provided with a pure SOCKS-Proxy, because as with any proxy server no encryption is available and authentication usually takes place in plain text (very few applications support GSS-API). Thanks to the combination between SOCKS and a VPN connection, the best balance between security and speed is reached, all outgoing SOCKS-Connections are optimized accordingly and all traffic is encrypted. For example, you can achieve much higher transfer rates with P2P-Applications, when combined with our SOCKS proxy. Another advantage is that our SOCKS-Proxy can be used against IP leaks and is significantly easier to configure than an ordinary firewall.

SOCKS is no longer in the beta phase and is available on all of our servers. To establish a SOCKS-Connection, you must be connected to the VPN and have a Premium subscription.

SOCKS-Address: socks.hide.me
SOCKS-Port: 1080​

If the VPN-Connection would to be interrupted, then the Proxy will lose the connection. So you can limit the data traffic of certain applications, such as Firefox, Chrome, uTorrent or Thunderbird on our VPN server. Most applications offer a support for SOCKS5 so no additional authentication with Username and Password is necessary in this case. Should the application lack support for the SOCKS5, then all traffic for that particular application can be bridged with Proxifier (Windows/Mac) can be bridged.

Example configuration for popular programs uTorrent

Other applications will follow shortly ...

Source: community.hide.me