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NordVPN is the Best VPN (for Thwarting Nosy Cybervillains)

Most VPNs are junk. NordVPN isn’t just worth your buck, but it’s the best overall VPN I’ve tested.

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Nearly half of the US was using a VPN as of early last year. Who knows, it could be more by now. What are you waiting for? A virtual private network (VPN) is a service that routes all your incoming and outgoing internet traffic through a middleman server to make it harder for cross-site trackers, data thieves, snoops, and nosy websites to track where you go online.

As sophisticated as these annoyances (some are downright threats) have become in recent years, I consider a good VPN almost mandatory these days. It’s tempting to throw in the towel on online privacy, but it doesn’t have to be hard or expensive to fend off the bastards that try to snoop on you.

You wouldn’t stand for somebody poking through your window blinds at home, would you? Don’t stand for it online, either. NordVPN remains my number one recommendation for somebody when they ask which VPN they should use. It’s been my top recommendation for, oh man, at least five years. Here’s why.

For a more thorough explanation of how a VPN works, along with a couple more worthy recommendations, check out my guide to the Best VPNs.

What you’ve gotta know about nordvpn

There’s a reason I crowned it the Best Overall VPN in my guide to the Best VPNs. NordVPN is blazing fast, as far as all the VPNs I’ve tested over the past 10 or so years. And it’s easy to use. But more than that it’s highly trustworthy. That counts for a lot. It counts for damn near everything when you’re talking about a product designed to protect your privacy and anonymity online.

NordVPN (opens in a new window)

Fastest of the worthwhile, trustworthy VPNs

7,400 servers in 118 countries

Verified policy of not recording user activity

The beauty about testing a VPN is that the most normal way to test it is simply to connect to its servers and use the computer as usual. I hopped around from server to server, trying them out in a whole bunch of cities and countries around the world a lot more than a normal user would. I had to check them out and make sure I wasn’t just getting lucky with one or two good servers, after all.

But other than that I downloaded and uploaded large files, streamed 4K video (including live sports), and generally used my computer as normal, logging into VICE’s CMS to publish stories and surfing the internet to see how NordVPN held up under the kind of normal uses most people will experience.

What it’s actually like to use nordvpn

A couple of years ago NordVPN had a slightly annoying habit of dropping its connection more frequently than I’d like. I’m happy to say that they’ve seemed to........

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