A VPN—or Virtual Private Network—has all sorts of uses. Privacy comes pretty close to the top of most people’s lists. After all, you’re a lot more visible online than you might realise. By accessing your IP address, which is publicly available, shadowy characters can find out everything from your ISP to your physical location.They can keep tabs on your online activities, too, such as which websites you’ve visited and where you’ve gone. Plus, if somebody knows your IP address then they can subject you to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, overloading your system with requests from thousands of machines. No-one needs that kind of heat, which is why VPNs have exploded in popularity over the last few years. For the uninitiated, VPNs guard against unwanted attention by routing your traffic through an anonymous server in a country of your choosing. Once you’ve installed a VPN it’s absolutely impossible for anybody—even your ISP—to identify you. But privacy isn’t the only reason why more and more people are choosing to go dark. VPNs are also essential for serious gamers, offering a huge number of benefits beyond cybersecurity. Need for Speed For one thing, a VPN like Surfshark can give you a much needed speed boost by preventing your ISP from throttling your data. After all, they can’t slow you down if they can’t find you. Plus, you can give yourself an edge by routing your traffic through a server that’s closer to the game server, reducing the distance that your data must travel. Anyone who has ever spent an evening getting destroyed on Fortnite knows how important it is to keep that ping as low as possible, and a VPN is an impenetrable shield against some of the commonest causes of latency. Naturally, it’s important to go with a VPN like Surfshark with plenty of servers to connect to. At the time of writing, Surfshark has more than 3200 servers in 100+ countries, giving you options galore. Every single one of these servers is equipped with up to a 10Gbps port, so you should never struggle with access. There’s more. A World Without Borders A VPN effectively lets you pretend you’re somewhere else, allowing you to get around two of the most irritating phenomena of the digital age: online censorship and region-locking. Granted, if you’re reading this it’s relatively unlikely that you live in a country that routinely bans games for political or cultural reasons—but not impossible. Installing a VPN lets you circumvent this kind of restriction in a jiffy, allowing you to enjoy everything that the hugely creative game development community has to offer. Even if you’ve never ensured the sting of censorship, there’s a very good chance that you’ve suffered the indignity of region-locking, where a studio chooses to release a game in one territory but not another. Publishers have their own commercial reasons for doing this, usually related to testing, market research, or hype-building, but that doesn’t mean you have to put up with it. Simply install Surfshark and you can play whatever you like whenever you want, no matter who’s trying to stop you. Play Anywhere Even when you’re not being frozen out by your government or a foreign studio, you can find yourself unable to get online when connected to an uncooperative wi-fi hotspot, some of which are configured to block game servers. For instance, it’s quite common for workplaces and university networks to impose these sorts of restrictions. You know what we’re going to say next. If you’ve got a VPN installed, you can play online anyway. Download Surfshark right now to see what an open and secure internet looks like.