How to Tell If Your VPN Is Actually Working
The connected indicator only reports a handshake. Four checks — IP, DNS, IPv6 and WebRTC — tell you what the rest of the internet can still see.
7 min read
VPNs Explained, Set Up and Troubleshooted
Most VPN advice is written by people selling VPNs, which is why the same five features get described as essential regardless of what you are trying to do. These guides take the opposite approach: what a VPN genuinely protects against, what it does not, and which of the settings buried in the app are worth changing. The troubleshooting guides cover the two failures everyone hits — a connection that halves your speed, and one that says connected while sites still refuse to load.
VPN guides(16)
What Split Tunnelling Is and When to Use It
Route some apps through the VPN and leave the rest on your normal connection. Faster and less disruptive, as long as you remember what is not protected.
7 min read
Is Using a VPN Legal, and How to Check For Your Country
VPNs are ordinary business tools in most of the world. A small number of countries restrict or ban them, so here is how to find out what applies where you are.
7 min read
How to Set Up a VPN On Your Router
Check your router supports a VPN client before anything else. Then it is a config file, a reboot and a leak test — and a speed test you should not skip.
8 min read
VPN Keeps Disconnecting On Mobile Data
Phones change networks constantly and aggressively kill background apps. Both break VPN tunnels, and both have specific settings that stop it.
7 min read
Why Netflix and Other Streamers Block Your VPN
Licensing contracts are country-by-country, so platforms are contractually required to detect VPNs. Here is how they do it and why it keeps breaking.
7 min read
VPN Connected But Sites Are Still Blocked
The tunnel being up says nothing about whether your traffic is using it. Four checks separate a leaking VPN from a site that has simply blocked the server.
8 min read
Why Your Internet Is Slower On a VPN
Some slowdown is physics and cannot be fixed. The rest is server choice, protocol and MTU, and those three account for nearly every case worth troubleshooting.
8 min read
VPN vs Proxy: The Difference That Actually Matters
A proxy redirects one application's traffic. A VPN redirects the whole device and encrypts it. Which you want depends on the job, not on which sounds stronger.
7 min read
Free VPN vs Paid VPN: What You Give Up
Running VPN servers costs money, so a free service recovers it somewhere. Here is where, and which of those trade-offs actually matter to you.
7 min read
What a VPN Router Is and Whether It Is Worth Setting Up
Running the VPN on your router covers every device at once, including ones with no VPN app. It also costs speed and makes ordinary problems harder to diagnose.
7 min read
What a VPN Concentrator Is and Who Actually Needs One
Dedicated hardware for terminating hundreds of VPN tunnels at once. It is enterprise equipment, and almost nobody reading this needs to buy one.
6 min read
What VPN Passthrough Is and Why It Barely Matters Now
A router setting from the era of PPTP and L2TP. Modern VPN protocols do not need it, and most routers keep the toggle only for compatibility.
6 min read
What a VPN Tunnel Is and How Your Traffic Travels
A tunnel is ordinary packets wrapped inside other packets. Understanding that one mechanism explains almost every VPN problem you will ever hit.
7 min read
What a VPN Kill Switch Does and When to Turn It On
A kill switch blocks all internet traffic the moment the VPN tunnel drops. Useful for some tasks, actively annoying for everyday browsing.
7 min read
What a VPN Actually Does, and Whether You Need One
A VPN moves the record of your browsing from your internet provider to the VPN company. Here is what that genuinely protects, and what the marketing overstates.
9 min read
Topics in VPN
VPN questions
Do I actually need a VPN?
For a specific job, yes — reaching your home or work network remotely, or keeping your browsing from your internet provider. For general safety on modern websites, far less than the marketing suggests, because HTTPS already encrypts the contents of almost everything you do.
Does a VPN make you anonymous?
No. It moves the record of what you visit from your internet provider to your VPN provider, and does nothing about accounts you log into, cookies or browser fingerprinting. It changes who can see your traffic, not whether you can be identified.
Why does a VPN slow my internet down?
Your traffic takes a longer path and gets encrypted and decrypted along the way. A nearby server on a modern protocol costs a few percent; a server on another continent can halve your speed.