Server coverage is easy to find out: Go to the website of the VPN that you’re interested in and check their server page. If you want to make sure that you have the fastest VPN available, when choosing one, you should keep server coverage and server quality in mind.
How to Make Sure That You Have a Fast VPN As such, encryption is the least likely influencing factor of your VPN’s speed. Dobrev explains, most VPN services will use an encryption standard that doesn’t affect regular users too much. That being said, generally speaking, as Mr. A more secure encryption cipher, like AES-256, for example, will take longer than the same one at 128 bits. Last but not least, the encryption used must be considered. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, of course, but that’s the most likely explanation, especially considering when we ran the tests: early morning on the Eastern seaboard and mid-afternoon in the Netherlands. We expect that’s what happened with our speed tests: The Amsterdam server may have been experiencing a heavy load, while the New York server might have had far fewer people on it. Staying away from the fuller ones should help keep your speed high. Many VPN providers-but far from all of them-will give you an indication of server load. Even then, however, at peak times or on popular servers, speed will suffer. As such, a VPN service that wants to be fast must employ high-capacity servers that can handle many people using it at the same time. VPN Server LoadĪ VPN server can only handle so much at once. However, this could be due to another reason, namely, the load on the server. Usually, when you connect to a server in Amsterdam and another in New York from Cyprus, the one in the Big Apple will be noticeably slower. Even though the duration is often measured in picoseconds, time is time.įrom this, it follows that a server that’s close by will-all other things being equal-always be faster than one that’s farther away. While it’s tempting to think of the internet as being instantaneous, the packets that contain the bits and bytes that hold the information you’re sending and receiving have to travel a physical path over the connections.
The biggest speed bump for your connection is the difference between you and the server. This time, we’ll connect to a server in New York, which is about 8800km, or 5500 miles away. Now, we’ll do another test and see what happens. You’ll immediately see that latency goes up, while both download and upload speeds go down. Interestingly enough, it connected to your author’s hometown, just a few miles outside of Amsterdam.
We’ll first connect to a server that’s relatively nearby in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands (about 4000km or 2500 miles from Cyprus, give or take), and see what kind of result we’ll get. For the purpose of this article, we’re using ExpressVPN, a service that we really like. To see the change when we use a VPN, we’ll need to connect to one first. The upload speed, however, is something to keep in mind for professionals looking to work while using a VPN, as it influences file sharing and the like. In this case, the ping is vital for people who want to game online while using a VPN, as it influences how fast changes are transmitted over your connection, a measurement called latency. The download speed is probably the most important for everybody else, as it determines how fast you can browse the web and stream. This isn’t exactly a high-speed connection, but on Cyprus-where Larnaca is-you take what you can get. These describe the ping, or latency, of your connection, as well as the download and upload speeds. Hit the big button and wait for the approximately 30 to 60 seconds that it takes to test your download and upload speeds. Once the measurements are done, you’ll be presented with the results of the test.