Why You Need a VPN
Security is too often thought of as a zero-sum game. You either make the effort to protect yourself and lose out on performance and shiny new toys, or you choose faster connections and an easier life with the understanding that you may end up making making ransomware payments or having your identity stolen. We argue that this mindset is long out of date, especially in the world of virtual private networks,or VPNs. These services protect your data within an encrypted tunnel, keeping bad guys, ISPs, and snooping spies at bay. Using such a service will certainly have an impact on your internet connection, but the good news is that it needn’t be a big one.
Using a VPN tends to slow down internet connections simply because it adds more steps to the process of transferring data over the web. When you browse without a VPN, your web browser sends a request through your local network, out onto the public internet, and to a web server that responds with the requested information. This is what happens every time you click a link or enter a URL. It’s how the internet works. But you still need a VPN. Why? We’ll explain.
When you activate a VPN, your web traffic is routed through an encrypted tunnel. It travels through this secret tunnel to a server operated by the VPN company. It then exits its encrypted tunnel and enters the public internet.
