Internet connection sharing made easy
Connect your entire LAN to the Internet with a single IP address simply and securely.
If you want to connect a local area network (LAN) in your office to the Internet today, you have several options to choose from. The simplest is to buy a small standalone router or gateway. These devices are inexpensive, reliable, and mostly plug-and-play. If you know what you’re doing, you can set up a router and network in less than an hour. However, this might not be your best option.
There are important reasons why a router is not the best solution. How secure should your data be? Do you need (or would like) to know exactly how much Internet traffic each of your PCs consumes? Do you have priority traffic that needs to pass? Do you have employees who might be using the Internet for purposes other than work?
A simple hardware gateway will not meet these conditions. You could spend a small fortune on a sophisticated device that meets some of these and still not have the optimal solution.
An alternative to expensive hardware is to set up a dedicated computer to control Internet access and connectivity. In this case, your choice is financially limited to one of two platforms: *nix or Windows. While *nix (Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) is technically great for the task, it’s not as cost effective in a typical company with a multitude of Windows PCs. A *nix system has one very significant drawback: you’ll have to hire a system administrator to manage it or you won’t be able to adjust internet access and you’ll risk the network constantly failing.
Using a dedicated Windows PC to control how users on your LAN access the Internet is the only option left.
While Windows itself provides a limited set of basic connectivity features, you’ll need to purchase and configure dedicated gateway server software to use advanced features. Entensys UserGate 4.1 is a proxy server for Windows that is not only the simplest gateway server to set up and use, but also has all the advanced features your business may need.
There are two ways UserGate can share an Internet connection between users on your LAN. One way is to set it up as a gateway, much like standalone hardware routers. UserGate supports NAT and port mapping to share a single IP address among multiple LAN users. Using NAT requires no additional configuration on client computers and is the fastest way to set up Internet access.
If you want more advanced features, such as caching your Internet connections, you can set up a User Gate proxy server. The proxy server automatically caches the most frequently accessed web resources by users on your LAN, saving significant Internet bandwidth and dramatically increasing access speeds.
There is no way for users on your LAN to bypass UserGate to access the Internet, so you can create powerful rules to control user access to certain resources or protocols.
You can also configure content filtering to block unwanted websites, resources, or specific file extensions (such as MP3 music).
Your LAN is always protected against external attacks by UserGate’s built-in firewall. The built-in antivirus quickly scans all Internet traffic to protect your network from spyware, viruses, and malware.
If you have different types of traffic, such as VoIP, you can easily limit the maximum bandwidth for each user to ensure that time-sensitive clients get the necessary bandwidth. You can also limit the connection speed for any user on the network and you can control the maximum load of your Internet connection.
UserGate keeps comprehensive statistics about each LAN user, including the list of URLs visited and their online time.
Its integrated billing makes UserGate a perfect solution for splitting a single Internet connection among multiple users.
The latest version adds VPN support, providing the same connection sharing and statistics features for public and private networks. Transparent VPN and proxy support makes UserGate a perfect solution for sharing safe and secure Internet connections.
UserGate is powerful, easy to use and easy to use. Download your free evaluation version at: