Hi,
I bought myself a *** subscription and now I have a VPN. For what do you guys use the VPN?
Do you always surf with a vpn? Or only specific websites? Or do you only use it to torrent?
When I use this VPN, does is slow down my internet?
Sorry in advance if the questions are dumb, but I actually tried looking for answers already.
First things first, know what a VPN is. A VPN is simply a service that sends all of your traffic through a secure tunnel to another location where your traffic can then begin its usual journey.
My go to analogy is real life commuting. Without a VPN, you leave your house for work, taking all of the usual roads, driving your own car with its own color and make/model. With a VPN, you have a tunnel at the end of your driveway that leads to some location 1, 100, 1000 miles away, once you leave the tunnel, you carry on with your usual commute. You leave this tunnel with hundreds or thousands of others. You drive the same car as everyone else, making it very difficult for any prying eyes to see where you go after leaving your house.
Since you’re using that tunnel, you will notice some kind of performance impact, it may be slight or substantial. It all depends on how long and how congested it is.
You don’t need to use a VPN for every day internet activities, but its generally a good idea. It’ll prevent ISP’s and others from seeing your traffic, collecting data on you and so forth. HOWEVER, it will not do anything for you if you’re visiting sites where you have an account, or when you visit a site that collects your location/cookies, etc.
Just remember a VPN isn’t a magic key to the internet where you unlock secret things and are completely invisible to others. All its doing is routing all of your traffic somewhere else, you can use that to your advantage to mitigate data collection and such. But if you don’t know how a VPN works and continue using the internet like you normally would, you aren’t gaining much benefit.
The biggest reason I use a VPN is to access work dev environments. I can’t sign in without being on the VPN. Business VPN use is totally different than personal, though.
Really for me, the main reason I would use a VPN personally is when I’m on public Wi-Fi so I know my traffic is encrypted from any other connections on that network.
I also have a VPN server running on my home router that I can use to access my home network on my phone or laptop when I’m not at home. That way, I could send something to the printer from Starbucks, or access my NAS files without having to make them public facing.
Want to exchange vpn for hulu?