Selecting the best VPN for gaming
Gaming online today involves numerous security risks, everything from DDoS attacks to hackers compromising your IP address, personally identifying information, and more. VPNs can help to secure these risks and reduce the surface area of vulnerabilities. Among the many benefits of using a VPN, some are unique to gaming.
Selecting the best VPN for gaming can let you compete in tournaments that are geo-restricted, and you otherwise would not have access to it. They can allow you to purchase games that are not available in your country, give you the advantage of buying games sooner than your peers who do not have a VPN. VPNs can also help to improve lag and reduce ping times by using more stable and faster server connections.
No matter which way you look at it, for gamers and internet users in general, VPNs have become a necessity. The only question that remains is which VPN provider should you choose. When evaluating a provider for your online gaming needs, reliability and speed are the most critical aspects to consider.
While many VPN providers claim the fastest speed, only a few can deliver on those promises. In the following, we compare the top three VPN providers’ speed and performance as tested by professional network engineers.
The VPN contenders are:
- PureVPN
- ExpressVPN
- NordVPN
To kick things off with PureVPN is one of the best VPNs for gaming as they boast the fastest service in the world. In a recent speed test by proprivacy.com, PureVPN delivered 83.02 Mbit/s average speed and 177.48 Mbit/s at peak. They also managed 95.7 Mbits/s sustained when tested by pixelprivacy.com. Couple these speeds with 2000+ servers in 180+ locations worldwide, and you get a feeling that PUREVPN is blazing past the competition.
The next VPN we looked into was ExpressVPN. Their speeds are impressive at 81.09 Mbit/s average and 217.22 Mbit/s at peak; they fall a little short in available locations with 160 locations worldwide. Being able to select the perfect server location for your game connection is essential in gaining an edge over the competition.
Lastly, we have NordVPN. Being one of the older companies in this list makes NordVPN a recognized name in the industry. Their speed test results came out as 74.95 Mbit/s average and 213.92 Mbit/s at peak. While their peak speeds are commendable, in the demanding environment of gaming servers, sustained speed is king. Sporting over 5000 servers in 59 countries, NordVPN brings a massive network of servers whose primary focus is reliability.
A VPN does not speed up your home internet connection. A VPNs core responsibility is to encrypt your internet traffic and route it to a VPN server on the way to its final destination. Added encryption and extra journey your traffic takes can slow down your internet connection.
The fastest VPNs are simply the VPNs that provide fast servers so that the connection speed is as negligible as possible. What this means is that the servers must work as fast as possible (preferably faster than your actual internet connection).
In summary, we realize that choosing the best VPN provider for your gaming needs can be a complicated task. The sheer amount of VPN providers can be overwhelming to select. We can assure you that PureVPN will keep your data safe and your connection secure while you destroy your gaming rivals. But don’t just take our word for it, be sure to check out the tests here:
