Using a VPN is a great way to protect your privacy while surfing the web, but it’s not without its pitfalls. You may have noticed that some sites treat you differently because you’re using a VPN.
Let’s go over some of the ways this can happen and what steps you can take to mitigate the problem.
Some Examples of Discrimination Against VPNs
Yes, you can get discriminated against across the web for using a VPN. Here are some examples you might've encountered.
Google Search CAPTCHAs
It’s common to encounter CAPTCHAs when you try to perform Google searches through a VPN. Google serves these up whenever it suspects you might not be a human, in an attempt to block bots, scrapers, and other kinds of abusive traffic.
Other Sites Using Google’s reCAPTCHA
Google has made their reCAPTCHA service freely available for anyone to use. As a result, any site can make use of Google’s significant resources to detect suspicious activity. This means that you’re more likely to encounter difficult CAPTCHAs in the wild while your connection is tunneled through a VPN.
Sites That Completely Block VPN Users
CAPTCHAs are annoying enough, but some website owners go a step further and attempt to block VPNs altogether. For example, Social Blade (shown above) uses Cloudflare to intercept VPN traffic.
How Websites Detect and Block Your VPN
Wondering how websites detect whether or not you're using a VPN? Several techniques are in use to spot connections made via a VPN.
IP Blacklists
Anti-VPN mechanisms primarily work by checking visitors’ IP addresses against blacklists of known VPN addresses. Since VPNs generally use known data centers to host their servers, it’s not very hard to determine the IP ranges they own.
Services like IPHub and ipinfo.io collect this information and make it available to their customers for a price.
In-House Fraud Detection
Large companies with a lot of resources like Google and Netflix are uniquely positioned to detect proxies due to the amount of traffic they handle. Even if a VPN service provides dozens of IP addresses, chances are that they will still show up many times among their millions of users, allowing the companies to easily flag suspicious IPs.
These businesses have significant engineering talent on hand, so their solutions may also use advanced technologies like machine learning to analyze and classify traffic patterns.
How to Avoid Getting Blocked
While there’s no foolproof way to always get around these mechanisms, there are a number of steps you can take to improve your chances.
Try Different IP Addresses
Many commercial VPN providers give you access to multiple servers spread out over different data centers around the world. By switching to a different server, you change your internet-facing IP address.
If you get blocked, cycle through the available servers. If you’re lucky, you could find one that isn’t on the site’s blacklist.
Inform Sites of Your VPN Use
It may be beneficial to notify certain sites that you use a VPN. For example, if you reach out to your bank’s customer service, they could potentially put a note on your account that would help resolve any problems should your VPN use be flagged by their fraud protection systems.
This is a particularly good idea if you’ve previously been connecting to the service without a VPN but plan to start using one in the near future, perhaps due to travel. Remember that sites generally restrict proxied traffic to curtail abuse by bots, not because they are specifically prejudiced against people that use VPNs.
Pay for a Private IP Address
The more people using a particular IP, the more likely it is to land on a blacklist at some point. Having your own private IP address makes it much easier for your VPN use to go undetected.
Luckily, most reputable VPN providers offer dedicated IPs, albeit usually at an inflated price. It’s worth investing in one if you often find yourself getting blocked by your favorite sites.
Use a Less Common VPN
Another way to avoid the more crowded servers is to use a less-known VPN provider. Since a few companies tend to dominate the market, you can expect them to appear prominently in blacklists. A more obscure VPN may be less likely to get blocked or trigger a CAPTCHA.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should use the cheapest, shadiest provider you can find. You especially want to avoid free VPN services. Not only are these usually swamped with thousands or millions of users, they are also magnets for fraud, piracy, and other problematic behaviors. Sites have a strong incentive to target them for blocking.
Tinker With Your Browser
In some cases, particular browser features or settings could trigger protection systems. For example, Google is more likely to serve up CAPTCHAs if you use your browser's private browsing mode in combination with a VPN. Turning off the mode reduces your chance of encountering them.
You may also want to clear your browser’s cache and cookies when you use the IP swapping method described above. Switching to a totally different browser is an even more powerful way to thwart any attempts at fingerprinting.
Roll Your Own VPN server
A more technical alternative is to install your own VPN server, either on a physical computer you control or on a virtual cloud server. You’ll be the only person using that server’s particular IP address, much reducing the chance that it ends up on a blacklist.
Note that the IP ranges of prominent cloud providers like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are also public information, so this may not be a completely airtight solution either. It would be more reliable to install the server on a physical machine that connects to the Internet through your own ISP.
No Need to Avoid VPNs
It can be annoying to face CAPTCHAs or other roadblocks when you’re innocently surfing the web. But for the most part, there are simple ways to bypass the mechanisms that sites use to discriminate against VPN users.
By taking a few steps to make your traffic seem less suspicious, you can use VPNs to protect your online privacy with less hassle.