Tag: ProtonVPN
The best VPN for gaming
We all know what VPNs are great for. They can help secure your internet traffic over public networks like at a café, airport, library, or other public place. VPNs can also get around geo-blocking in order to watch Netflix catalogs around the world, or access Disney Plus in a country that doesn't have it yet. Gaming is another popular use case for VPNs.
What to look for in a VPN for gaming
For gaming there are a few essentials. The first of which is speed. If you don't have good speeds, your online experience will just be terrible in general whether gaming or not. So excellent VPN speeds are a must.
The next big feature you need is stability, a VPN connection that gets online quickly and doesn't drop or slow down. To obtain stability you need a reliable service, but it also has to have a good number of servers. VPNs can often slow down as their servers get saturated with users. A larger network won't have that problem as much since it will automatically connect users to other servers that aren't seeing such heavy use.
If you have speed, stability, and a large server network to choose from then you're good to go. The only other thing you need is unlimited bandwidth, which means you need a paid service. Free VPNs have daily or monthly allotments, making it more or less useless for gaming.
Here's what we suggest as the best VPNs for gaming. (Too see our VPN picks for all the various common use cases, check out our comprehensive best VPN roundup.)
1. ExpressVPN
ExpressVPN is our top choice for the best VPN overall, and what makes it a good choice as a general VPN also helps when it comes to gaming. First, its speeds are in the top five in our download tests. Upload speeds are a bit weaker, retaining around 67 percent of the base speed when the top performers are around 80 percent. Still, ExpressVPN's upload speeds should be more than fast enough for gaming.
This VPN also has more than 3,000 servers in 95 countries around the world, giving this service a sizeable network. You should have no trouble finding a server that isn't too busy in most of the major countries. ExpressVPN costs about $100 per year, but if you want a VPN to make your gaming better it's worth it to pay the premium. Plus, there are a number of other advantages you can get from Express, which you can read about in our review.
2. NordVPN
A frequent choice as the top VPN from a number of critics, NordVPN is a very good choice for gaming. It has very fast download speeds (another top-five finisher), and its upload speeds were in the top 10, making it more than fast enough. NordVPN also has a wide range of servers with more than 5,000 total in 59 country locations. NordVPN isn't quite as easy to use as ExpressVPN, but it's still easy enough to understand for both novice and expert users. NordVPN also has a few nice features such as multi-hop VPN and TOR connections.
3. Private Internet Access
If you want servers, servers, and more servers then Private Internet Access is the choice for you. PIA has around 10,000 servers at the moment, and its speeds finished within the top 10 in our tests. Upload speeds were lower than NordVPN and ExpressVPN, but they are still stable enough for gaming. PIA doesn't have a ton of extras, but it's the best choice when you want a massive amount of server choices with good speeds.
4. ProtonVPN
ProtonVPN is our top finisher for upload speeds. So if that's the main concern for you, this is your pick. It's also the second-place finisher for download speeds. However, its server choices are quite a bit more modest than the other VPNs mentioned in this roundup, with just over 1,500, meaning there will be times when most of its servers are at or near capacity, especially in the United States. The country count is a bit lower at 63, but most of the major destinations you need are here. It's also stable and quick to connect. ProtonVPN has several pricing tiers so be sure to pay attention to what each tier offers before buying.
How we tested
To test VPN speeds, we take the base download speed on three days, with each testing day having a minimum speed of 80 megabits per second (Mbps). Then we test the speeds three times each in five different countries on each testing day. These countries are often, but not always the U.S., the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan.
The daily speeds are averaged together to get a daily average speed. Then we take the average of each testing day to get an overall global average. That overall average is then expressed as a percentage of the base speed. That way the test results provide a sense of how much speed a VPN retains over multiple locations. We avoid hard numbers since speeds can vary so much based on factors such as your service provider, router, devices, and time of day.
Do you need a VPN for gaming?
So we've seen what you need from a gaming VPN, but is this even something you need for your favorite online adventure or shoot ‘em up?
The answer is it all depends. One of the most common questions people have about VPNs and gaming is whether it will improve your ping times. That is, the speed, measured in milliseconds, that your PC can send data to the game's servers. VPNs can't really help here since it adds another connection point between you and your destination server. Instead of going from your PC to the game server and back, it goes from your PC to the VPN server to the game server and back. In most cases you will probably find that ping times either worsen or stay about the same.
Either way, it's a rare case where ping times are helped by a VPN. The one exception might be stability. In these instances, your bare internet connection isn't stable enough due to a high amount of activity in your neighborhood, or heavy load on your home network. In those cases, a VPN might make things a little more stable since you connection runs through a VPN server that specializes in keeping things moving.
That brings us to the next topic of potential ISP throttling. We're not talking about the nefarious kind where your service provider might try to charge you extra for access to gaming servers. Instead, we're talking about everyday traffic shaping, as well as penalizing bandwidth hogs (you) for taking up too much bandwidth at peak times.
Again in those cases a VPN may help. It all depends on how closely your ISP is monitoring your activity. If it's slowing down your connection to a specific server and prioritizing other traffic, then a VPN will most likely help. If, however, you're getting penalized for being too much of a bandwidth hog, the ISP will still see larger amounts of bandwidth and penalize you on that basis.
If your favorite time to play is 7PM at night, and that's a high traffic time, a VPN might help.
Another reason people love a VPN is for getting around geo-blocking restrictions. For the most part this is a bad idea or unnecessary for gaming. Many games already let you change regions freely, while others will only let you switch every few weeks. In those instances where you can't switch regions, and you want to try getting around geographic restrictions, keep in mind that your gameplay experience may not be that great. On top of that, you may be violating the games terms of service, setting yourself up for a ban. That goes for playing games and trying to get access to games early, as well as accessing DLC that isn't available where you are. It's up to you, but keep in mind there are risks to getting around geo restrictions in games. Plus game networks like Steam don't like this kind of activity, and the only thing worse than getting penalized by a game would be getting penalized by Steam.
One final issue is if you are playing a game that uses a peer-to-peer network instead of a client-server setup. These games aren't as common as they once were, but the fear here is that someone will find your IP address and try to kick you offline with a denial-of-service attack. A VPN would definitely help with that, and if you're experiencing something you think might be a DDoS then you could try playing with a VPN to see if it helps.
VPNs are solid tools for a few use cases, but whether you need it for gaming depends largely on your personal situation.
The best VPN for streaming Netflix
For years, getting access to Netflix overseas was easy. You signed up for pretty much any VPN you wanted, connected to an American server, and that was it. Then 2016 happened. That was the year Netflix expanded into 130 new territories. In a move to calm Hollywood during its global takeover, Netflix promised to get tough and stop people from streaming Netflix content over a VPN.
Since then it's been a cat-and-mouse game between Netflix and all the world's VPN providers that want to provide U.S. Netflix access to their customers. That's why choosing the right VPN is essential if you want to stream U.S. Netflix when outside the country.
Regardless of what your home billing address is, you always get access to the Netflix catalog of the country you're currently in. If you live in Idaho, but you and your laptop are in Japan, you get the catalog available in Japan. Sometimes that can be great and you get to see a movie or TV show that isn't available at home. Often, however, you just want to keep watching your stuff that's only available in the U.S., or the UK, or Canada, or Germany, or wherever.
Given Netflix's watchdog attitude towards VPNs, you need to choose a service that actively promotes compatibility with Netflix. The reason being that these services are willing to adapt their strategies to continue making Netflix available over their network. Some VPNs may accidentally work with Netflix, but if they aren't maintaining that compatibility it's not likely to last long. (For even more VPN options, check out our comprehensive roundup of the best VPNs in all categories.)
1. NordVPN – Best for Netflix
For our money, the best option for streaming Netflix is NordVPN. This company has been challenging the Netflix VPN ban from the start. It's also had a goal of making all of its servers work with the streaming service. As of this writing, this is the case. No matter which Netflix catalog you want, NordVPN promises to deliver it.
NordVPN has more than 5,000 servers and offers locations in 60 countries around the world. It also allows you to choose your specific server so that you can switch around if you need to when Netflix's ban hammer comes down.
In addition to top-notch speeds, and Netflix compatibility, NordVPN offers double-hop connections, and VPN over TOR. NordVPN also uses the WireGuard protocol by default, though it has made some modifications to make WireGuard friendlier and more private for commercial VPN services and thus calls its protocol NordLynx.
NordVPN is inside our top 10 for best speeds overall, and it should have no trouble streaming Netflix anywhere in the world.
2. ExpressVPN
If NordVPN isn't your style, our top VPN overall, ExpressVPN, is also an excellent choice. ExpressVPN offers more than 3,000 servers in 95 countries. It also promises that Netflix will work with every server it has, and ExpressVPN offers good speeds. Express is on the pricier side at nearly $10 0 per year, compared to $60 for Nord. But the app is easy to use, the speeds are excellent, and it offers some nice extras such as a private DNS service that lets you set up an Apple TV or console for watching U.S. streaming services overseas.
3. ProtonVPN
Another good recommendation is ProtonVPN, which is available at a similar price to ExpressVPN. Unlike NordVPN, however, Netflix doesn't work on every single Netflix server. It works on a lot of the more than 1,500 servers, but not every single one. The one issue with Proton is that it can have trouble from time to time, where a stream will suddenly stop, especially if you're watching while you work on the same PC.
4. Surfshark
Surfshark is another VPN that hits our top 10 for speeds, and while the speeds aren't outstanding—just 35 percent of the base speed in our last tests—Surfshark is plenty fast enough for Netflix streaming. This service is compatible with Netflix, it has ad- and malware-blocking features, double-hop connections, and, surprisingly, it offers unlimited simultaneous device connections as opposed to the usual five-device limit with most VPNs. The Surfshark app for Windows is also pretty easy to use.
Why does Netflix block VPNs?
As we mentioned earlier, Netflix's big expansion into pretty much every country on earth back in 2016 meant it had to get tough on VPNs. While Netflix produces a lot of its own content that it can make available worldwide, the company also licenses a ton of content from traditional entertainment studios.
These third parties are still working on a system of global territory licensing. Under this system, Netflix gets a package of movies and TV shows from these companies that it can show in the U.S., but that aren't licensed to be shown by Netflix in, say, Europe. To keep those companies and their other international licensees happy, Netflix must enforce a block on VPNs to prevent people from getting content made available to Netflix subscribers in the UK, but not the U.S.
“We are making progress in licensing content across the world,” Netflix said in a 2016 blog post. “But we have a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere.”
Netflix isn't the only company that has to enforce these restrictions. Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and others do it too. However, Netflix along with Hulu are easily the most active and effective at it.
Buying VPN access for Netflix streaming
We've already covered this in brief, but let's quickly deal with what you should be looking for in a Netflix VPN. First, most people should not make speed the top consideration. The minimum recommended bandwidth for a 1080p Netflix stream is 5 megabits per second (Mbps). If you're streaming in 4K it's 15Mbps. That's nothing, and nearly all the top VPNs hit those speeds quite easily in most places.
Instead, the first consideration should be the basic promise of Netflix compatibility from a reputable company. That's the rub. Any old VPN can promise Netflix compatibility, but if there aren't a lot of reviews about the service it may not be the real deal. Stick to well-known VPN services if you can.
Next, you need to consider how many servers are available for the service–especially the number in your target country. If you want Netflix Australia and the VPN only has two Australian servers, that could be a problem. Most of the popular VPN se rvices list their server networks online that show you how many servers are in each country.
Finally, make sure the VPN's desktop app (and don't forget about mobile) allows you to choose specific servers. Since this is a cat-and-mouse game you need a service with a number of servers in your desired Netflix country. That way if one server has been discovered by Netflix, it's possible the others are still working. Often, just switching servers is enough to keep watching, and sometimes even simply reconnecting to the same server is enough to fix streaming issues. That's the one word of warning we'd offer to anyone looking to play the international Netflix game. You will have to get used to occasional interruptions. Sometimes this can mean access to U.S. Netflix from overseas is blocked on a particular VPN entirely, though this often only lasts a day or two. Slightly more frequent interruptions may happen, where the stream will just stop. The fix for this is often just switching servers.
Finally, after all of that, consider speeds. Speeds for countries in North America and Europe are usually solid in the major VPN services. Australia and Asia can vary wildly, however. Any of our recommendations in this article will give you the speeds you need in those areas of the world.
How we tested
We only test on days that the wired internet connection hits 80Mbps or more. During the daily test we measure the speeds of five different locations around the world, running the test three times in each location and taking the average speed of each country for the day, and then we average those speeds again to get an overall daily average. Our countries are typically, but not always, the U.S., UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan.
The daily test is run on three different days at three different times of the day. We then take each daily average, and then average them again to get an overall average. We then determine that overall average as a percentage of the original daily speed.
The reason we don't bother with printing hard numbers as a rule is that experiences in hard numbers can vary wildly. It all depends on the speed of your internet connection, the time of day, and even device types can have an impact. For that reason we feel that percentages, which can show how much speed you can expect to lose on a given service, is a more useful indicator.
Netflix is an excellent service, and while the company doesn't like you to use VPNs, we've never heard of anyone being penalized because of it. Just choose your preferred VPN service wisely and you'll be good to go.
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