I have a VPN subscription which allows me to connect to servers in many different countries. The service allows me to pick a country, or to let it do it randomly.
Back when you could get on Hulu through an American server, I could see it making sense to pick an American server to access that.
But if you have no interest in accessing country blocked content, I’m wondering if there’s any advantage/disadvantage/risk to randomly selecting server or using ones in the same country all the time?
I appreciate any input. Thanks.
In a word, speed. Some servers have a higher bandwidth to your connection than others.
Thank you for both of your comments. Knowing the trade offs between speed and storage of identifable information is helpful. My service claims to not keep logs. I was wondering if someone used a server in the same country all the time (Poland, Romania, or Croatia for example), if that somehow made them easier to track or more identifiable…it’s basically what I was trying to get to in my original post.
My VPN subscription also allows connections to many different countries, selected either manually or automatically. It also allows each subscription up to 5 concurrent VPN connections.
I have set up VPN policy routing on my software router. The router maintains 3 concurrent VPN connections all the time, all to the same 3 different preselected servers. One connection is to a server in the same city as I’m located. Guests using my wireless AP have their connections routed through it. Since it’s “local”, any geographically sensitive applications the guests are using on their devices will behave as they would expect. Also the connection is fast so they don’t notice any delay.
When I post on Usenet, the NNTP traffic from my machine is routed through a different VPN connection, one that has an IP address resolving to be in the same country as most of the other posters. Likewise, sent E-mail, depending on where it’s going, is routed through still another connection. In some cases, I want my IP address masked, but still appearing to be from the city I’m in. In other cases, I want more anonymity.
So, in my case, I prefer selecting country-specific servers to suit my needs.
Well, here’s some general information. If you allow your VPN provider to auto select for you, you will get the server with the overall lowest ping, lowest load, and highest available bandwidth each time you go to connect. I do this 90% of the time unless I’m trying to circumvent country locks for some specific reason.
The privacy based conspiracy theorists don’t like using auto connect, and the reason is this: In order for your VPN company to figure out where you connect you, they have to take your IP address, store it for a second, then ping a bunch of servers relative to your real IP to select which one to move you do. The conspiracy theorist doesn’t like the idea.
I don’t think it’s any different than connecting directly though, in reality, because the VPN company still has to note and temporarily store your real IP to hand it off to the VPN server anyway. As long as the VPN company isn’t writing your IP to disk and saving it, I don’t think it matters either way.
So my advice: use the auto connect feature. You tend to get good speeds with less server load by doing so.
I don’t think so. Not if your VPN company isn’t keeping logs. I’d use the same server over and over for performance if I got better performance from doing that. Don’t worry about making it easier to track. Most VPNs have tons of people on the same server anyway. You are bound to share that IP with others.