What Causes a Slow VPN? How to Solve The Issue

VPNs are great for protecting your privacy and seeping your data secure, but almost all VPNs come with one major downside: they slow down your internet connection. Many VPNs slow you down as much as 50%. This can make trying to stream a movie or have a video chat almost impossible. What causes a slow VPN connection?

If you search the help pages on any VPN service they will tell you to check the same things when trying to fix a slow VPN experience:

• Check your internet router
• See if your ISP is throttling your connection
• Use the server closest to you geographically

Reading the same advice over and over again can make you feel like you are the problem. But, the truth is most of the time your router is fine, your ISP is delivering the speed it promised, and you are using the closest server.

Chances are buried somewhere deep in the FAQs or Help section of the VPN website is a statement that tells you that you should expect some slowing down of your Internet connection when you use a VPN. And it’s due to the nature of how traditional VPNs work.

Slow VPN is basically a design flaw. Almost all VPNs work the same exact way. Your computer is connected to a remote server via a single secure socket. All of the data being sent to and from your computer or mobile device is first routed through the remote server.

On the server all of the data is encrypted. This prevents anyone from being able to know what websites you are visiting as well as masking your true IP address.
From a security standpoint this works great. Nobody can get any identifiable information about you or your computer.

But, from usability standpoint, the design is awful. Only having a single socket connected to the secure remote server (as most VPN services have) means that your bandwidth is limited. If you are doing something that uses a lot of data, like streaming videos, playing video games, or having a video chat, you will create a traffic jam. It can easily get so bad that apps that use a lot of data will become unusable.

If anything happens to your Internet connection, such as your Wi-Fi signal fluctuates, you will probably lose the connection to the VPN server. You will have to spend time reconnecting before you can use the VPN again.

Speedify is a channel bonding VPN which offers the security of a VPN while also combining multiple Internet connections for speed and reliability. Speedify does this by creating many transport connections, over every Internet connection on the device, to a server on the Internet.

Data is encapsulated and intelligently divided on a packet-by-packet basis between the connections. Even streaming video apps that use a single socket to send all of their data can be split across connections. This is bonding and is different from load balancing which you may think of – see here the differences.

Speedify is cost aware, so out of the box it intelligently favors Wi-Fi over the more expensive mobile connections. Everything, including uploads, downloads, web browsing, and streaming video can be accelerated by Speedify.

But there’s more than just bonding: Speedify’s unique error correction technology recovers lost packets before they slow your Internet speeds to a grind. So even with just one internet connection, Speedify can give you a huge speed boost when you reach the edge of Wi-Fi or cellular range.

What are you waiting for? Get Speedify today and experience Internet the way you want!