Is VPN and proxy the same?

A user asks: So I hear that VPN is kind of just a proxy or the next best thing - if this is true, does it matter? Is it just a method to hide your IP address to hide yourself from internet spying when using your ISP provided Wifi? Thanks! This is one of the most common questions I get asked when talking about VPN's. It is often hard to figure out what the real distinction is, but I think it helps to separate the two.

VPN has to do with private networks. As most of you know, private networks use routing as a security concept. Private networks are private because the packets inside never leave the network. A customer might access a server on the network, a remote web host, email server, DNS resolver, or anything on the Internet. If a customer's ISP can see packets arriving at the private network, then they can see what website their customer is visiting, for example.

Private networks also mean more for corporate use; the use of a private network on the public Internet is not an everyday reality. Most commonly, private networks in the big corporate enterprise mean that a network admin is allowed to make rules about what websites are accessible through the private network and will work.

VPN is about private network use, and when you say private network, you have to assume traffic leaving the network can be monitored (or at least know about). It is a critical piece of software and hardware on a corporate network that allows for the above scenario to happen. And the best way to ensure that the router doesn't know about it is to use a VPN.

If you wanted to use a VPN to access a VPN in a private network, that wouldn't be possible because your first point of connectivity would always be your Internet-facing router, so any Internet packets leaving that system would be seen by your private network ISP. VPN is the next best thing to a private network. A lot of people ask if you're really hiding your true IP when you use a VPN. While this might seem like a technical detail, people often wonder if it actually matters since it won't really hide your true location from the people spying.

There are two ways you can feel good about the safety of a VPN, and your privacy.

Can I use VPN and proxy together?

I am trying to understand the pros and cons of having a VPN and proxy together. For example, do these two setups interfere with each other? Is it possible to have one that acts as a firewall (block port 80/443) but also routes http and https traffic through a vpn? Thanks. You can use any number of firewalls, proxies and VPNs all at the same time, provided they will not try to stop each other. The only way to tell what will be allowed is to try them out, there is no easy way to say "these are allowed and these aren't", you need to test them individually and see what happens.

Does a VPN override a proxy?

Can a VPN (proxied by an HTTPS proxy) also act as a proxy. The reason I ask is a VPN has no overhead, but the proxy can cause load issues on the network by having to use more resources than they are required to.

Are there different rules for IPV6? No. If you're running Tor over IPv6 with your VPN, you're not using Tor, you're using your VPN and Tor will function as it should. A VPN is just one kind of proxy. Other kinds (like SOCKS proxies) are also proxies and we're not saying they can't act as a network-wide VPN replacement.

We can't stop the world. We can only stop people who won't stop. We will never make the world a better place without making some people hate us.

We understand you to mean only a VPN from a non-US based service provider can serve as a network-wide VPN. For example, if you have access to a VPN in France, you may connect to your VPN from any of the five major US Internet Service Providers, like Vonage, or even at my personal favorite, Amazon. As long as it's not an US VPN, the data goes to France. Any American VPN service can't do that.

Is there an exception? I have a US Virtual Private Network server. You want to use your virtual private network (VPN) server as a proxy when you access https sites or for any other purpose you want. It won't work well.

Why not? The IP addresses would be getting redirected and you need to set up DNS. You are correct that this can become an issue, and in fact, we had an article covering just that in the last issue of Tor Magazine. But, what about if the DNS resolution is provided by your VPN service? After all, we've already determined the VPN can proxy our https traffic without problem and that our requests would be transparent to the remote site. If it's working for us, it must work for everyone.

To answer your question directly, this setup can work for https requests as long as the DNS resolution comes from the VPN service itself. Unfortunately, you'll end up paying much more for what little functionality you gain.

It depends. What are your needs?

Is proxy slower than VPN?

Which is faster: proxy or VPN? If you are asking this question, it means that you have never used a proxy. I was in the same situation once.

I was working in a very big company and my work was located in a very far place. My company had a proxy server at their office and I had to use it to connect to the Internet. After a while, I switched to a VPN service that I paid for. I was wondering, after my first use of the VPN, whether the proxy was slower than the VPN.

I did a quick speed test on both methods and it turned out that the proxy was indeed slower. This was due to the fact that it does a lot of checks and then does a redirect to the remote server. The proxy has to download all those things before it connects to the remote server. The VPN on the other hand connects to the remote server without all those steps and redirects.

This should be the reason why your web browsing is going faster when you are using the VPN. The proxy connects first and does all the necessary checks, then redirects to the desired website. That is why the VPN is faster.

I hope this helped you. Note: I do not work for the VPN provider that I used in my example.

Why use proxy instead of VPN?

There are numerous advantages to using a proxy server. Here are some of them: VPN does not allow the IP address, port or protocols to be changed. Bypassing censorship. Protect your privacy. No NAT/Firewall required to use it. The disadvantages are: A VPN server can be very unstable (ie you may experience disconnects and loss of your connection). You need to run a VPN server on a secure virtual machine or in your own computer. Which means more complicated setup.