Private Internet Access VPN: Review Of The Number Of Servers

According to the official statement released by Private Internet Access, the service is planning to close down some of its servers located in South Africa and Brazil.

For those who preferred to surf the Internet with virtual IP addresses in those locations for whatever reason, be it anonymity or the need to access a local network, this is bad news, as the provider implies that the solution is permanent.

The motives for the removal of servers are different for each country. For South Africa, it is caused by the service’s data center being shut down by its owners. Such a development is curious because it shows one of the main disadvantages of VPN services renting data centers from third parties.

As for Brazil, the reason behind the closing of the servers located there is, as PIA puts it in its statement, “a change in tone” of the Brazilian authorities regarding compliance with the local legislation. The law that forced the service to retreat from the country prescribes that all companies that provide Internet protocol (IP) related services have to collect and keep their users’ data for one year.

The implication here is that this data has to be shared with governmental agencies at their request.

Such information as the real IP address, websites that the customer visits while connected to a VPN, time and duration of the connection, etc. can be used to identify any client and determine what they did on the Internet and when. Avoiding it is one of the primary reasons why netizens use a VPN. In fact, a provider’s proven claims of keeping no logs are seen as a standard for the industry.

So far, Private Internet Access is the only service to take action because of the changes in the Brazilian legal environment.

Private Internet Access is a virtual private network provider which is known, among other things, for its huge network that consists of as many as 3335 servers. For a VPN, this number is very important as every server improves its customers’ Internet speed.

This use of servers is twofold: one the one hand, the distance between a customer and the VPN server directly affects speed. The greater it is, the slower the speed is going to be because of how far information has to travel. On the other hand, the fewer servers there are, the more users it is reasonable to expect to see connected to each one at any moment. This too affects speed negatively due to servers having bandwidth limits.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.