How do I use obfuscated servers in NordVPN?

Are obfuscated servers slower?

A few days ago I wanted to download some torrents and stumbled across the IP address of a website which redirected me to a different server.

The first thing I did was to go to whatismyip.com. As you can see below, the website shows an IP address of 216.66.30.

I clicked on it and it redirected to an IP address of 216. If you are wondering why there is an extra .1 on the end, this is a way to indicate that the IP address belongs to an obfuscated server.

In other words, the website that I just visited had a different IP address than the one I saw on whatismyip. The website itself was not encrypted and its content was available for anybody who knows what they are doing.

However, if I went to 216.30 and loaded the website, the website asked me to install a browser extension in order to view the website. In other words, the website was hosted on an obfuscated server.

Now I'm wondering if obfuscated servers are slower. If the website had an unencrypted IP address, it would have been possible to connect to it directly, without any need to install a browser extension. In other words, it would have been impossible to visit the website because it would have shown up as unencrypted on whatismyip.

It seems that the website could have been faster had it been hosted on a standard server rather than an obfuscated server. Maybe the obfuscation makes it slower or at least causes it to consume more bandwidth.

This is a completely wild guess. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Obfuscated servers slower? So you're trying to load a website that has an obfuscated server on an unencrypted connection (216.30) and an unencrypted connection on an encrypted connection (216.30) - or vice-versa - and then compare the speed at which they load?

And in the case of 216.30, you're going to the wrong place.

The IP address 216.30 is the address of your router/modem, not the address of the site itself. If you're trying to visit a website on your LAN, you'd want to type 216.

How do I use obfuscated servers in NordVPN?

Obfuscated servers.

There's been a good bit of discussion in the NordVPN forums lately around obfuscated servers (or IPs with fake IPs in DNS). People want more info around them, and the way we try to do that is by providing real IPs for those servers when we are being asked for them. The real IP addresses, though, are what I'd rather keep hidden since we do not actually use them. If you want to know the real IPs of those servers, you will need to connect to the servers directly via our standard public IPs. That's why obfuscated servers don't offer much advantage when the public side of a connection can be seen. They only work for non-standard ports which are usually well-hidden so people connecting via standard ports can't see them. The big advantage of obfuscated servers, though, is that they don't need a certificate, so that makes them really useful if you have your own self-signed certificate with a self-signed root authority that does not accept wildcard certificates.

Obfuscating servers from inside the VPN is something we never expected to ever have to do. The reason why we haven't done this until now is simple. There are a lot of things we have to check before we do that, including:

How it's done - do we have to use the same obfuscation method we used for our free servers? - do we have to use the same obfuscation method we used for our free servers? Is it supported for the version of OpenVPN we're using? is it supported for the version of OpenVPN we're using? does the IPs provided by us still work with non-standard ports? are the IPs provided by us still available in DNS? are any IPs we provided listed on our website? can we still provide an email address? are the emails available on our website? do our torrent stats still work?

Why is obfuscated servers grayed out in NordVPN?

You are not allowed to connect to this server because it appears to be obfuscated, meaning it has an unusual or misconfigured connection type that our detection systems do not understand.

Obfuscated Connection Types. To protect your data when browsing the web, you may wish to use a VPN service with the obfuscation protection described in "Obfuscated Networks and Unsecure Cryptocurrency". In these cases, the VPN servers you connect to may become obfuscated.

We understand these cases are quite rare for the typical user, but for those that want to protect themselves from being targeted by a particular nation-state, we recommend choosing to connect to servers within the .edu.ac, or .gov range.

If you have any questions about obfuscated connection types, please contact our support team so we can try to answer them for you.