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How to find the best VPN service: Your guide to staying safe on the internet

Whether you're in the office or on the road, a VPN is still one of the best ways to protect yourself on the big, bad internet.

A reader recently sent me this question:Why do I need a VPN? Isn't a proxy server good enough?

I've written a number of articles on VPNs, as well as 's list of the best VPN services of 2022, and so I get lots of interesting questions. Over time, I'll try to answer most of them.

This week, we're looking at why a proxy server can't protect you like a VPN can.

To understand that, you need to understand the difference between a proxy server and a VPN. Let's start with proxy servers.

Proxy servers were initially deployed by companies and ISPs to reduce internet traffic. The reasoning was that some sites were likely to be visited a lot by their users, and instead of downloading the same pages over and over again for different users, why not cache those pages locally for a while, and present those cached pages to each new user who made a request.

This reduced the bandwidth expense of the enterprise or ISP providing access to users, and also, sometimes, reduced the page load time for users. The way this worked was that users made an http request to the proxy server (proxy means something that represents something else) and the proxy then passed that request on to the web server.

As far as the web server was concerned, the user was the proxy, not the originating user on their computer. When the proxy examined or logged the IP address of the request, it was that of the proxy server, not the user.

The practice of using proxy servers expanded to the privacy community for users who want to hide their IP addresses from the servers they are accessing. There are all sorts of reasons you'd want to do this, from protecting your location if you're concerned about stalking, to illegally watching media content by effectively lying about your country of origin.

This use of proxy servers differs substantially from that of the corporate bandwidth-reducers, because most proxy servers that were set up to conceal originating IP addresses don't cache data. As a result, they're relatively lightweight in terms of the infrastructure required to support them. Over time, quite a few free and fee-paid proxy services found their way to the internet at large.

In a way, most VPN services are also proxy services. The key thing you need to know is that VPNs don't just spoof the originating IP address, they also encrypt and secure all internet traffic between your machine and the VPN service.

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