I'm clearly not VPN'ing properly. Where am I going wrong?

VPN
1

I know very little, perhaps nothing about the sort of IT/technical side of VPN’s. I know why VPN’s exist in terms of providing global access, which allows for disguising your location to serv whatever purpose. And that’s what interests me. I have a VPN with one of the well known names and have been using it for a month. In that time these things have occurred -

  1. My internet speed when connected to VPN reduces.

  2. More worryingly, my internet speed when disconnected, has drastically reduced, in what appears to be a permanent situation at present.

  3. There’s a forum that I regularly use and did access before when connected. I cannot get onto this site again, either connected or disconnected. It literally does not load. And yes I deleted my history/cookies. After punching the enter key, the url just stays static and my page stays white. Via incognito, I can access the site but as soon as I login, the same blank screen happens. It’s like I’ve been blocked or something. I quite literally cannot get onto it anymore.

  4. Streaming quality when connected is awful. I was watching a football game this evening and was connected to the country in which the game took place. It was literally impossible to see the time on the clock or the names of the teams. The game intermittently froze throughout and I must have seen ‘playback error’ about 30 times which required a refresh each and every time. This is not the first time I have experienced this.

  5. In conjunction with (4), I have had it before where the website I am watching a football game on has recognised that I am actually using a VPN and kicks me out.

So my question is, what’s going on? Why is it proving such a headache? I’m aware the internet may lag after googling but like why am I having so many issues? If everyone were having the same, I doubt people would use VPN’s. And that’s just it. I’m wondering why I’m bothering with this. It’s making my life significantly harder. I don’t get it. Why is this so bad? It’s supposed to be one of the best out there. I can’t wrap my head around why it is creating so many problems?

2

  1. normal

  2. shouldn’t happen, any chance your ISP is throttling you ? Ask ISP ? Maybe uninstall VPN completely, see if speed comes back ?

  3. does it happen from other devices too ? Maybe they banned you for using VPN ? But page should at least load.

4+5) streaming site penalizes/bans VPN use ? Understandable.

3

I have a VPN with one of the well known names

TBH it sounds like you have a free or no-name VPN

4

If your VPN rhymes with Ford , it sucks. Connecting to a VPN far away from you will dramatically reduce speeds. When I use servers close to me I maintain 55 MBps download when normally I get 60 MBps.

If you’re having Internet issues outside of using the VPN then your internet is being sucky and should call your ISP to fix it.

5
  1. Bizarrely, I cannot access the site on my phone when connected to my phone mobile data. I can’t quite wrap my head around how that works but it doesn’t load. But the site loads on incognito. Makes no sense.

4+5 - I thought the whole point of a VPN was the ability to disguise your location? If they can identify the use of a VPN, then what is its value?

6

100% promise you not. Obviously I want to share it but can’t according to the rules.

7

There are ways a site can tell that you’re using a VPN, either by knowing the IP addresses of VPN servers, or by seeing some network params that indicate VPN, or by seeing conflicting location info values. The site would have to do some work to tell this, but streaming sites may be willing to do the work.

8

A VPN is not designed to hide your location. A VPN is used to protect your data on insecure networks. Due to the nature of Vpns, you can use it to do lots of things like piracy, accessing geo-restricted content avoiding ISP throttling and more

9

Okay so I use mac and sometimes what happens to you on 3 happens to me but it’s usually the whole internet connection. I found out that it happens because somehow the vpn connection changes some dns properties. I’d advise you to check your dns.