Why You Shouldn't Use A VPN

All VPNs are rubbish and should only be used for entertainment purposes.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is often marketed to give you better security and something you couldn't possibly live without, let us explain why almost everything you've been led to believe is wrong and why you don't need a VPN.

First of all, let's explain in the simplest terms possible what a VPN is and what it does... A VPN is a proxy, a middle guy between your PC and the servers you're accessing (the internet). What it does is routes all of your traffic through the proxy to the internet.

Interestingly the intention of a VPN was to allow users to connect to a local network from the outside. For example, a remote employee connecting to his companies internal network to access documents. This gave companies in the 1990s a more secure way of granting access externally. Yeah we mentioned the 90's and we should really emphasise that's a long time ago and they aren't actually as safe as they once were. By today's standards, this is extremely risky, if an employees password is stolen or is very simple to crack then you're putting the entire company network at risk.

VPN's have been marketed however to make you believe that just because you're using a VPN you're somehow invisible and super safe on the internet. Sure your Internet Protocol (IP) address might be masked but your devices probably have location services enabled and most websites use cookies to track you anyway so no, it doesn't really make you invisible at all.

Your data isn't safe because it's going through a VPN, please read that sentence again, 'it's going through a VPN'. It is going through your VPN provider, a business that has access to anything you're using your connection to do. This business which might be based in a different country, governed by their own laws can easily put your privacy at risk. They can claim they won't look and maybe some don't but when those VPN providers get hacked and oh they absolutely do, everything is available to the hackers, everything. Some huge VPN providers like NordVPN and TorGuard were hacked in 2019 putting literally millions of users at risk.

VPN's don't add extra security to your connection you're just connecting to the internet from what appears to be a different location. There are also Domain Name Server leaks which occur when your internet browser ignores the connected VPN and sends DNS queries to your ISP (as if you weren't using a VPN in the first place). If you click on a bad link and download a virus or malware you're still going to get it, the VPN doesn't magically stop this from happening. You're still using the internet it isn't the shield that it's marketed to be.

VPN's also have a negative impact on your internet speed, you only have to look at it logically to realise this. You're connecting to the internet and then connecting to your VPN which then essentially tunnels your connection to another location and in some instances another country to then allow you to access the internet. You've just added all this extra time and not to mention you're connection speed in terms of bandwidth is limited by the VPN's congestion. Ultimately your internet reaction speeds are slower and your download speeds are generally worse.

The majority of VPNs use bait and switch tactics in their marketing, they offer you a wide variety of benefits with promises of safety and anonymity when in fact all they give you is a way to attempt to hide your traffic from your ISP.

The only real reason that we would ever use a VPN is purely for entertainment. If there's something you can't access in your country then using a VPN to give you local access can be useful.

We're an affiliate of windscribe as this is one of the few VPN services that allow you to access US Netflix and other international streaming services giving you many more choices of entertainment. Plenty of VPNs promote this feature but many in truth are able to offer it for extended or uninterrupted periods.

To be crystal clear, we aren't promoting the use of a VPN for anything other than entertainment purposes.

As always, take action at your own risk. If you'd like help, get in touch.