How to hide your IP addressFour methods, and what each actually covers

Your IP address is attached to every connection your device makes. It carries a rough location and identifies your internet provider, and every site you open records it.

There are four practical ways to present a different one. They are frequently listed as alternatives, which is misleading — they cover different things and fail in different places.

• VPN — covers every application, costs 10% to 60% of your line
• Browser proxy — covers one browser, nothing else on the device
• Tor — strongest separation, slowest by a wide margin
• Mobile data — a different address, still tied to you
• Not one of them helps if you sign in to something

A VPN: everything on the device

The tunnel carries every application, not just the browser. That is the practical difference from a proxy and the reason it is the default answer: your mail client, your streaming apps and the background traffic you never see all go through it.

The cost is throughput, and we measured it rather than estimating: between 40% and 90% of the raw line survived across 14 cities. The other cost is trust — you have moved the record from your internet provider to the VPN provider, which is only an improvement if you have reason to prefer the second.

A browser proxy or extension: one application

A proxy changes the address for whatever is configured to use it, which in practice means one browser. Everything else on the device carries on as before, and this is the failure people do not notice: the browser reports a different country while an app on the same device reports the real one.

Proxies are usually faster than a VPN because most of them do less — many do not encrypt at all, which means the network operator can still see where you are going. If the reason you wanted a different address was privacy on a shared network, a plain proxy does not deliver it.

Tor: the strongest separation and the slowest

Tor routes through three relays run by different people, so no single one knows both who you are and where you are going. That is a stronger property than a VPN offers, because it does not require you to trust one company.

It is also slow enough to be unusable for video, and some sites refuse Tor exit addresses outright. It answers a different question from the one most people asking about IP addresses are actually asking.

Mobile data: a different address, same person

Switching to a mobile connection gives you a different address immediately and costs nothing. It is genuinely useful for testing whether a block follows your address or your account.

What it does not do is separate the address from you. Your mobile operator knows exactly who holds that connection, and the address still resolves to your country. As a way of checking something, excellent. As a way of hiding, not.

The one that catches everyone: the DNS lookup

Before your device connects to a site, it asks a DNS server to turn the name into an address. If that question goes outside the tunnel — which it does by default in some configurations — then your internet provider still has a complete list of every site you looked up, no matter how well the traffic itself was hidden.

This is called a DNS leak, and it is the most common way a setup that looks right achieves nothing. A competent VPN client routes DNS through the tunnel and says so; a browser proxy generally does not, which is another reason the two are not interchangeable.

It is worth testing rather than assuming. Open a DNS-leak checker while connected: if the server it reports belongs to your home internet provider, the lookups are going around the tunnel, and the address you thought you had hidden is being announced every time you open a page.

Choosing between them

• Region-locked service: a VPN, because the app matters as much as the browser.
• Public network privacy: a VPN, and check that it lists a kill switch — three of the seven providers we track do.
• One site in one browser, nothing sensitive: a proxy is enough.
• Separation you do not have to trust a company for: Tor, and accept the speed.
• Testing whether a block is address-based: mobile data, in ten seconds.

The mistake worth avoiding is treating these as a quality ranking. They are different tools, and the right one depends on which of the five situations above you are in.

How much speed actually survives the tunnel

Every VPN site says a tunnel costs you speed. Almost none of them say how much. We measured it by hand rather than repeating a claim: 14 cities, 46 paired runs, comparing NordVPN and Surfshark against the same raw line in the same session. In the 11 cities where we also measured the bare line, the share that survived the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%.

Measured by VPN LIFE. Raw-line figures are rounded to the nearest 10 Mbps. Percentages are the share of the raw line that survived.

• 14 cities, 46 paired runs, measured by hand
• 11 of those cities also have the bare line measured
• 40% to 90% of the raw line survived
• We only name a winner in 4 cities — the rest have too few runs

The spread between cities is larger than the spread between providers. In London roughly nine tenths of the line survived on both services; in Tokyo it was closer to half. That is worth knowing before you blame the provider: "this VPN is slow" is usually "this route is slow".

We only call a winner in a city when we have five or more paired runs there and the gap is at least 10%. That threshold is met in 4 of the 14 cities — Tokyo and Los Angeles, where NordVPN averaged ahead, and London and New York, where the two were level. In the remaining ten cities we publish the numbers and say the sample is too small, rather than ranking on one run.

The apps behind our measurements

The providers we track

We rank on what we can check. Each of the five below publishes a location in this use; the tables are our own counts and the providers' own published terms, not a summary of their marketing.

ExpressVPN: the widest spread of cities

ExpressVPN

ExpressVPN publishes more multi-city countries than anyone else in our set — 11 countries where you can pick between two or more locations, including 56 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, 6 in Australia and 4 in Japan. If your problem is a blocked address rather than a missing country, that spread is the thing that gets you out of it. It is the most expensive option here, and it is the one we would pick for streaming.

Go to ExpressVPN

NordVPN: the largest country list, and the one we measured

NordVPN

NordVPN covers more countries than anything else we track. It is also one of the two services we measured ourselves, so the retention figures above are its actual numbers rather than a claim. It operates from Panama, has been audited by Deloitte, allows 10 simultaneous connections, and lists obfuscated servers and a kill switch among its features — the two things that matter where VPN traffic is filtered.

Go to NordVPN

Surfshark: unlimited devices, and level with NordVPN in half our tests

Surfshark

Surfshark is the other service in our own measurements. In London and New York it was level with NordVPN; in Tokyo and Los Angeles it trailed by 11% and 17%. It places no limit on simultaneous connections, which makes it the sensible choice for a household rather than a person. Audited by Deloitte, operating from the Netherlands, with Camouflage Mode for networks that filter VPN traffic.

Go to Surfshark

CyberGhost: the longest money-back window, with a catch

CyberGhost

CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee is the longest here, and it is the reason it appears on most lists. Read the condition: 45 days applies to the six-month and two-year plans, and the monthly plan gets 14 days. It publishes 10 multi-city countries, with 11 locations in the United States, but only a single city in Japan — so it is a weaker choice if Japanese services are your target.

Go to CyberGhost

Private Internet Access: unlimited connections, US jurisdiction

Private Internet Access

PIA places no limit on devices and publishes an Advanced Kill Switch, obfuscation, multi-hop and port forwarding. Its no-logs claim has been audited by Deloitte Audit Romania. The trade-off is jurisdiction: it operates from the United States, which some readers will rule out on principle. We list it because the rest of the record is strong and because it is one of only four providers with two or more cities in Japan.

Go to Private Internet Access

Frequently asked questions

Will hiding my IP make me anonymous?

No. It removes one identifier. Accounts you sign in to, payment methods, cookies already on your device and your browser's own fingerprint are all unaffected.

Can I just use my browser's private mode?

Private browsing stops your own device keeping a history. It does not change your address at all — every site still sees exactly the same one.

Will it slow my connection down?

Yes, and we have measured how much: across 14 cities and 46 paired runs, between 40% and 90% of the raw line survived the tunnel. The variation between cities is wider than the variation between providers — London kept about 90% on both services we tested, Tokyo about half. If a VPN feels slow, the route is a more likely explanation than the provider.

Can I use a free VPN for this?

Usually not, and the reason is measurable rather than moral. Even on paid services we measured, between 10% and 60% of the raw line disappears into the tunnel — in Tokyo a 780 Mbps line came out at roughly half. Free tiers add a data cap and a much smaller server list on top of that. They also have to earn money somewhere, and where the product is free the revenue usually comes from the traffic itself.

Conclusion

Four tools, four different coverage areas. The question to ask is not which is best but which applications need to be covered — that answer picks the tool for you.

The speed figures above are our own paired measurements, published with the sample size attached.

Every figure on this page comes from our own daily collection or our own measurements. The files are published as open data under CC BY 4.0, and the method — including what the numbers do not prove — is on how we test.