Speed issues

[SlowRunner]

I have MB on my computer and happy with it. I just installed NordVPN and my speed took a drastic turn for the worse. Wanting to know if anyone has had problems with a VPN and speed.

[exile360]

That's definitely possible since all of your traffic has to go through their servers.  You can try disabling the VPN to test and verify that it is as fast as normal, then re-enable it to see if it slows down again just to make sure, but that is probably the cause.

There will be some natural latency when using a VPN just because all traffic must go through the VPN provider's servers first so it adds a lot of additional hops and overhead to your traffic/connection.  Depending on what you are trying to accomplish with regards to the VPN, if it's just a matter of privacy from your ISP then you could try an alternate DNS instead such as OpenDNS (and optionally use DNSCrypt as well which adds additional encryption to your DNS lookups/connections), Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS (one of the fastest DNS providers available), Google DNS or one of many other alternate DNS providers.

Of course there are also other VPN providers out there, but I believe pretty much all of them will likely slow down the connection at least somewhat.

You could also use an alternative if browsing privacy is your main concern such as Tor which is a special build of Mozilla Firefox designed to provide the highest level of privacy/anonymity online possible pretty much.

You can also take a look at the info in this article to see if any of those tips for speeding up your VPN help.

[MikeW]

Good tip exile  (Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS (one of the fastest DNS providers available)

Hadn't tried this one before really works well on desktop and phone.

Thanks

Mike

[SlowRunner]

Thanks for the info, I'll look into it
 

[David H. Lipman]

NOTE:

DNS does not slow down Internet. A slower DNS server may introduce latency in the resolution of a Domain name to an IP address but that only occurs once per Domain name to IP address occurrence. Its like a 5mph ramp to a 65mph highway where you travel 200 miles on that highway and the ramp is only 200 feet long. That 5mph for 200 feet has little overall effect on the travel time. Even if on that 200 foot ramp you did 10mph instead of 5mph the time difference would be inconsequential.

Edited March 15, 2019 by David H. Lipman
Edited for content, clarity, spelling and grammar

[Amaroq_Starwind]

In general, VPNs just tend to be slow, at least in my experience. Not only does your traffic need to make additional hops, it also needs to be encrypted which increases its volume. This is why a good VPN service would ideally compress your traffic and then encrypt it, or if I were in charge of development, would allow you to only route specific traffic (on a per-port, per-application or per-destination basis) through a VPN.

Tor, while seemingly incompatible with VPNs, does seem like the way to go. And yes, definitely use the Cloudflare DNS, because it is not only the quickest-resolving DNS, they also encrypt your DNS queries if you're using the Cloudflare DNS phone app.

Welcome to the forum, @SlowRunner. If you have any other questions, feedback or issues,  I look forward to helping you out!

[Amaroq_Starwind]

Actually speaking of Tor, @David H. Lipman does the MalwareBytes website use .ONION by any chance?

[SlowRunner]

Thank you all for the info on DNS, I'm actively looking into it. Securing yourself on the internet is a lot more complicated than I thought. If you hear about somebody's brain exploding it's probably mine.

[David H. Lipman]

I doubt that Malwarebytes supports the Tor network.

 

[Amaroq_Starwind]

You never know. I have a feeling that if they really wanted to, MalwareBytes is well within their ability to employ Tor networking for a lot of things. It isn't even that uncommon for companies to use Tor browsers for security reasons, and the most well-known Tor browser is itself a fork of Firefox, which most people should already be familiar with.