A few weeks ago I touched on the basics of VPNs, but what does a VPN actually do behind the scenes?
Let’s think of accessing the Internet linearly for a second. Without a VPN, if you were to access the Internet in the comfort of your home, you’d simply hop on a website and start browsing. (You > Internet). However with a VPN, it might look something like this, (You > VPN > Internet).
But what does that extra step do?
As I mentioned in my last VPN article, this extra step encrypts and “scrambles” your IP address, making your access totally anonymous and virtually unreadable to anyone who may be attempting to monitor your activity. Think of a VPN as a “tunnel” of sorts. The tunnel is a secure line from you to the Internet. This tunnel also happens to be encrypted. So even if any would-be hackers out there were to attempt to observe your activity, it would be essentially impossible for them to decrypt.
One neat little perk to using a VPN is using it as a way of getting around geoblocking. Geoblocking prevents you from accessing certain websites/media outside of your country or state. For example, some YouTube videos out there are only accessible or exclusive to a certain country or continent. With the VPN service I use, I’m able to circumvent this by connecting to network in a different country. For example, if a particular YouTube video was only made available to the public in Copenhagen, with just a few clicks I could route my connection to a network in Denmark, sit back, and enjoy the video.
VPN is certainly not without it’s drawbacks though.
Adding the extra step and being essentially a digital “middle-man”, you may notice a dip in your connection and download speeds. It seems the further the network you are connected to is from your actual geographic location, the slower your connection may be.