VPNs are on the rise today, but it can often be hard for consumers to separate what matters from meaningless marketing terms.
This guide will provide you with an introduction to some of the most common terms that you can safely ignore, and the details that you should look for instead that mark out the best VPN providers on the market.
Military-grade encryption
You might imagine that the military would use pretty tough encryption, but the AES-256 encryption standard is actually fairly ubiquitous and is used everywhere from the military and banks to every website that uses HTTPS. It's very tough, but it’s widely used, and certainly not unique to VPNs.
It’s better to look for VPN providers that regularly run independent audits of their technology and processes and transparently publish the results, proving their claims that their systems are secure and that they do not retain any logs of their users.
There’s also the possibility that quantum computing will one day be able to crack current encryption, so firms like ExpressVPN, which invest in forward-looking technologies like post-quantum encryption, mark themselves out as being a step ahead of the competition.
"Massive discount"
While many VPN providers offer significant discounts for events like Black Friday, it’s common to see pricing being presented in what seems like a deliberately confusing way. As a starting point, providers often show per-month equivalent pricing for plans that are paid upfront, in a single payment. It’s also worth checking VPN renewal pricing, as this is often much more expensive than the introductory rate.
Some providers will also advertise “extra” months. If you look into the numbers, though, you’ll see that these aren’t free and that, against expectations, the per-month price is reached by dividing the upfront payment by the extended contract term. Any extra coverage for your money is great, but the wording can be a little misleading.
We recommend comparing providers on what they offer and not on their current discounts. Tiered plans often add features that are much more expensive as standalone products, such as antivirus, personal identity removal solutions, and cyber insurance, but you should only sign up for these if you'll actually use the extra services. If price is a top priority for you, then make sure to compare overall spend rather than per-month prices.
Many VPNs secretly also allow you to "stack," purchasing more time for your current plan by signing up for what seems like a new subscription with your current email address.
Complete anonymity
Your activity is never entirely anonymous online. Your ISP can (generally) see that you’re using a VPN, and your VPN provider knows your original IP address. In addition, if you’re logged into an app or service, it will be able to track your activity and may be able to detect that you’re logging in from an unusual IP address. Third parties can also use online fingerprinting to track you, using behavioral indicators and the unique combination of software and updates on your device to identify you.
Our advice is to look for providers that run regular no-logs audits and are transparent about their results, confirming that they do not store or share any information about your internet activity. You can also boost your security and anonymity with features like multi-hop VPN, which passes your connection via more than one VPN server, and obfuscation, which makes it harder for third parties to detect that you are using a VPN.
You might also consider using Tor. Several leading VPN providers (like NordVPN and Proton VPN) offer Tor over VPN, so you can get the best out of both tools. There are downsides to Tor, though. Tor encrypts your data and directs it through the layers of the Tor network (hence its name, “The Onion Router”). However, your data has to exit the network to reach its destination. Your data is decrypted at this point, and various third parties monitor these exit nodes to attempt to extract potentially valuable information that they can hijack. As the list of exit nodes is public, you’ll also find that their IP addresses are often blocked.
No-logs policies
Having a no-logs policy, in which the VPN provider commits not to track or log user activity, is a very important starting point. However, you’ll often have to blindly trust that the VPN is being honest about not logging your activity.
If you’re looking at a VPN, you should make sure that its claims have been proven, either through a third-party audit of its processes and technology, or better yet, in court (as with Private Internet Access). At Tom’s Guide, we favor companies that run regular audits of their services, audit multiple levels of their technology stack, and are transparent about the results.
Other positive indicators include having an open-source code base, allowing the community to inspect the workings of the VPN software, and posting regularly updated transparency reports on official requests for data (and the fact that these haven’t been or can’t be met). Many free VPN services, on the other hand, will admit that they track you to some degree and sell on the data, breaching your online anonymity, which is why we recommend picking free VPNs with care.
Thousands of servers
Many VPNs boast about how many servers they have. However, this is meaningless after a point, and some of the leading providers have stopped publicizing their overall server count.
Instead of looking at server numbers, look for providers with solid infrastructure and good audit results that offer servers in the countries and locations you need. It’s also worth looking for providers that use RAM-only servers, which are wiped every time they reboot to limit the possibility of any data storage. This approach was pioneered by ExpressVPN, which uses its proprietary TrustedServer technology to ensure that all its servers are running as intended, but is now followed by many reputable VPNs.
In terms of coverage, you realistically only need support for your own country (for fast, anonymous connections), another nearby country that enables you to bypass any restrictions in your location, and any countries where you want to access geo-restricted media. While the best providers do typically have the largest networks, having access to another 100 countries beyond this probably won’t have much impact on your use of the service.
Blazing-fast speeds
What does “blazing fast” actually mean? If there's no data and no comparisons are made, then it doesn’t mean much. It’s worth remembering that VPNs will always have an impact on your connection speed as your data is being encrypted and sent via a remote VPN server. When testing services, we use high-speed connections to gauge the maximum speed that your connection could potentially run at (so we really can identify the fastest VPN services).
The best way to get insights into the comparable speeds of VPN services is with third-party data (like the information we provide in our product reviews), which allows you to see how services work in the real world. Beyond this, we recommend looking for providers that offer upgraded infrastructure with 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps servers, like Surfshark.
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
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