What is a VPN server location, and how do you pick one?

Let's follow one request. You're in Madrid, you open WrapVPN on your phone, choose Frankfurt and connect. Then you open a weather site.

Your phone encrypts the request and sends it to our exit server in Frankfurt. That server unwraps it and sends it on to the weather site. The site replies to the server, which wraps the reply and sends it back to you in Madrid. It all happens in moments, but every step goes by way of Frankfurt.

That's all a server location is: the place where your traffic leaves the tunnel and joins the open internet. In WrapVPN each location is a city, such as London, Stockholm, the New York area, Singapore or Tokyo, and the list in the app is always the current one.

The weather site never sees your phone's address. It sees the exit server's, and every internet address belongs to a network in a particular place. Sites look addresses up in location databases to guess where a visitor is, so this one guesses Frankfurt and shows you Frankfurt's forecast.

It's rather like posting a letter through a friend in another city. The letter arrives with their postmark, so the person who opens it assumes it came from there.

Everyone connected to that server shares the same address, so to the weather site you're just one of the visitors arriving from it. That's part of the privacy a VPN gives you, and it's also why sites treat the address as a rough guide to where you are rather than proof of who you are.

What the location doesn't change is anything on your phone. Apps you've allowed to use your location, like maps, ask the phone itself and still know you're in Madrid. Your language and time zone settings stay as they are, and a site you're signed in to knows it's you wherever your traffic comes out.

Every location adds a detour. From Madrid, sending your traffic via Frankfurt adds a few thousand kilometres to each round trip, which you'll barely notice. Sending it via Sydney adds most of the way round the planet, and you'll feel it in every page that loads.

You feel the detour most in things that go back and forth constantly, like video calls and online games, because every exchange pays it again. A page that loads once and then sits there is more forgiving.

On iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows, each location in the list shows a response time in milliseconds, and a lower figure is faster. A location near you is usually the fastest, because your traffic spends the least time travelling to it and back.

Distance doesn't buy you anything in return. The tunnel is encrypted the same way to every location, so a server on the other side of the world isn't more private than one down the road. It's simply further away.

Most of the time, the right location follows from what you're trying to do. There are three common reasons to pick one, listed here in the order most people need them.

WrapVPN has servers in some countries, not all of them, and the list changes as we add and move servers. If the country you want isn't there, pick the nearest one to it. For speed, a neighbour is usually just as good; for a home service, a neighbouring country may or may not be enough, so try it before you depend on it.

Every plan reaches every location, including the free plan, so you can experiment as much as you like. To switch, choose another city from the list in the app.

A server location is just where your traffic comes out, and websites take their idea of your country from it. Start with the nearest location, and change it only when you have a reason to appear somewhere else. Install WrapVPN on your phone, open the location list and see which city shows the lowest figure from where you are.