NordVPN is the most secure and private Virtual Private Network in the world, and it also has one of the biggest server networks on the market.
While there are a few VPNs with broader networks than NordVPN, not many can compete with the quality of servers. NordVPN has thousands of high-quality servers that can handle peak traffic and unblock more streaming sites than any other VPN service except for ExpressVPN.
Even though some VPN services may offer a large and diverse server network, they don’t always allow users to connect to all of those servers. These restrictions don’t apply to NordVPN. This VPN provider enables users to connect to any server they want at any time.
Offering a large selection of servers is one thing, but it’s another thing to make sure there’s a variety of locations for users to choose from. This is another area where NordVPN leads the pack compared to other VPN providers.
Note:
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What Are NordVPN Specialty Servers?
Readers should know that unlike many other top VPN services, Nord VPN offers specialized servers. These servers perform better than usual when the user is carrying out specific tasks such as P2P file-sharing or using Tor via Onion Over VPN.Currently, NordVPN offers a range of specialty server types. Here’s a list:
- P2P servers
- Onion Over VPN servers
- Double VPN servers
- Dedicated IP servers
- Obfuscated servers
As you can see, there are a lot of specialized server types offered through NordVPN’s subscription package, including in-demand options like double VPN, dedicated IP and Onion Over VPN. NordVPN’s list of servers contains hundreds of these options, and they can come in handy when you’re in a situation where you need to connect to specialized servers for P2P transfers or other activities.
Use the appropriate server to avoid unnecessary slowdowns and disconnections.
For an optimal experience, you should only use these specialty servers when they’re required. Otherwise, you are just wasting resources.
Pro Tip:
For routine everyday tasks, go with the standard servers. For more sensitive activities, go with either Double VPN servers or Onion Over VPN servers.Certain business environments and servers are more conducive to VPNs that offer dedicated IP addresses.
What Are NordVPN P2P Servers?
To properly understand P2P servers, you have to understand how a regular server works. NordVPN has a standard VPN server that encrypts the user’s internet traffic and hides their real location by giving them a new IP address.
NordVPN servers may be faster and more secure because of certain features, but ultimately, this is what most legitimate VPN service providers try to do.
Still, NordVPN works to stay ahead of the competition by offering users special server types, including P2P servers.
These P2P servers are just like the standard servers but with one extra feature: They allow users to use torrenting applications with NordVPN. Users can engage in different P2P or peer-to-peer activities, provided they have the right torrent app on their computer.
The company’s P2P servers enable users to share, upload and download certain files through P2P apps like BitTorrent and uTorrent, while also ensuring that the user’s privacy is never violated throughout the exchange.
Like many other VPN services in the market today, NordVPN doesn’t have to offer P2P servers to users. But if it didn’t, the company would lose a good number of users who want a fast and convenient tool to share their favorite content with people connected to the same network—all while also protecting their privacy and security through the function of a VPN.
In a traditional setting, whenever a user wants to download a folder or file from the internet, they have access to servers to do it. Sometimes, the user may have access to a number of servers to choose from. But P2P changes all that by turning simple downloaders to uploaders.
This is where the benefits of sharing really come into play because the process of downloading a given file is much easier when there are so many people offering the same file.
Now, you may know that P2P sharing is often associated with privacy and security concerns. So the obvious question becomes: Why is a company like NordVPN offering servers that facilitate P2P transfers?
While it is true that P2P sharing often involves transferring questionable or copyrighted content, and internet service providers all over the world usually try to discourage their customers from taking part in any such exchange. But, it’s also true that P2P technology itself is not inherently unsafe or legally compromised.
Torrenting itself is legal in most countries, and it’s often used for educational or journalistic purposes.
Public records are sometimes available for free through torrenting clients. All you have to do is download an open-source torrent client to view the documents or datasets. The Internet Archive, for example, uses BitTorrent to store archived files.
Corporations also use P2P transfers to move data around on their systems. Sometimes, P2P can come in handy when you want to send updates quickly to a large number of people.
This is important:
While torrents are used every day for legitimate purposes, certain legal problems enter the equation when copyrighted content is involved. We recommend checking the laws and regulations around torrenting in your country.No matter what you do, though, you should always take measures to protect your privacy and identity while P2P transferring. This is why you should always use a Virtual Private Network service like NordVPN while downloading/sharing/uploading torrents and making P2P file transfers.
What Is an Obfuscated Server?
Standard servers are perfectly fine to protect your privacy and guard your identity. But you need to take special care to preserve your anonymity if you’re in a country like China, North Korea or Iran that imposes internet restrictions or domestic surveillance on citizens and residents.
Governments in these countries have installed network firewalls that restrict access to services and apps more than usual. In these countries, regular servers will not work all the time.
Fortunately, NordVPN obfuscated servers can unlock the internet for you, even in a highly restricted environment.
If you are in China or North Korea and can’t access a particular news site or online service, then you should use obfuscated servers. These servers will not only unblock streaming services and apps for you, but they will also hide your internet usage from government authorities.
Now, since these servers require NordVPN to make use of even more security and privacy features, you may find your internet speed taking a significant hit, especially when compared to normal servers.
But under extreme circumstances where you need to access important news and information anonymously outside of a censorship-based firewall, you might not care about the speed of your connection.
However, keep in mind that NordVPN recommends that you only use obfuscated servers if you can’t access websites and online services in countries with censorship policies. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with even slower speeds.
How Do I Choose a NordVPN Server?
Picking the best servers can be a difficult task if you’re new to VPN services. To make it easier, NordVPN has a dedicated “server picker” tool on its website that allows customers to pick the best option from the list of servers.Generally speaking, though, when you want to connect to a server just to get some privacy, you should choose the one that is closest to your real location. Of course, when you want to unblock a streaming service like US Netflix, you have no other choice but to use servers located in the United States.
Now, there are two ways to choose NordVPN servers:
- You can install the NordVPN app and then check the option that automatically connects you to the nearest servers.
- Or, you can use the server picker tool available on NordVPN’s website.
If you’ve installed the NordVPN app, you only have to go to the servers section to find the best option available for your task and location.
Or with the server picker, you may have to do a bit of work before it recommends good servers. If you want to stream content through NordVPN’s list of servers, you’ll have to tell it which country you want to connect to. If you want to stream Netflix in the United States, pick from the NordVPN US server list.
Next, you may have to click on the option that says Advanced and then choose from the list of NordVPN servers. After that, the server picker may also ask you to pick the VPN protocol you want to use and then it will give you a name that represents the best option for your situation.
The NordVPN server picker tool shows you the hostname as well. This is the name that users have to use if they’re setting up their VPN connection manually.
How Many Servers Does NordVPN Have?
Some VPNs will tell you that they have a ton of servers worldwide without saying exactly how many they offer. Others will only go as far as disclosing the continent on which they have servers.
Then, other VPN services count virtual servers as real servers. But with NordVPN, most servers are not virtual servers and you always know what city or country they’re located in.
Taking geographical region into account, over 2,300 NordVPN servers are located in the Americas, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Costa Rica and Chile. Of course, whether or not the individual servers support P2P, Double VPN or Obfuscation is something you’ll have to confirm from NordVPN’s website or app.
There are also more than 2,000 NordVPN servers in Europe, with the main NordVPN locations being the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Germany, France and the Netherlands.
These two regions form the bulk of the NordVPN’s gigantic list of servers, but it also has over 100 servers in India, Africa and the Middle East (including the United Arab Emirates) as well as more than 600 servers in the Asia Pacific which includes countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand and Indonesia.
Country | Location | Server Type | Count |
---|---|---|---|
Australia | Adelaide | Standard | 24 |
Netherlands | Amsterdam | Dedicated IP DoubleVPN Obfuscated Onion Standard | 5 4 7 2 159 |
Greece | Athens | Standard | 19 |
Georgia | Atlanta | Obfuscated Standard | 2 98 |
New Zealand | Auckland | Standard | 26 |
Thailand | Bangkok | Standard | 7 |
Serbia | Belgrade | Standard | 20 |
Germany | Berlin | Obfuscated Standard | 2 84 |
Slovakia | Bratislava | Standard | 13 |
Australia | Brisbane | Standard | 43 |
Belgium | Brussels | Standard | 56 |
Romania | Bucharest | Standard | 21 |
Hungary | Budapest | Standard | 19 |
Argentina | Buenos Aires | Standard | 22 |
New York | Buffalo | Dedicated IP Standard | 8 111 |
North Carolina | Charlotte | Standard | 55 |
India | Chennai | Standard | 15 |
Illinois | Chicago | Dedicated IP Obfuscated Standard | 2 2 102 |
Moldova | Chisinau | Standard | 4 |
Denmark | Copenhagen | Standard | 72 |
Texas | Dallas | Dedicated IP Standard | 7 163 |
Colorado | Denver | Standard | 60 |
United Arab Emirates | Dubai | Standard | 5 |
Republic of Ireland | Dublin | Standard | 41 |
Germany | Frankfurt | Dedicated IP Obfuscated Standard | 5 5 152 |
Vietnam | Hanoi | Standard | 15 |
Finland | Helsinki | Standard | 15 |
China | Hong Kong | Obfuscated Standard | 6 67 |
Turkey | Istanbul | Obfuscated Standard | 1 9 |
Indonesia | Jakarta | Standard | 16 |
South Africa | Johannesburg | Standard | 56 |
Ukraine | Kiev | Standard | 23 |
Malaysia | Kuala Lumpur | Standard | 15 |
Portugal | Lisbon | Standard | 24 |
Slovenia | Ljubljana | Standard | 5 |
England | London | Dedicated IP Double VPN Obfuscated Standard | 22 1 1 395 |
California | Los Angeles | Black Hole Dedicated IP Obfuscated Standard | 1 11 11 199 |
Spain | Madrid | Standard | 66 |
Virginia | Manassas | Dedicated IP Double VPN Standard | 1 1 50 |
New Jersey | Matawan | Dedicated IP | 7 |
Australia | Melbourne | Standard | 36 |
North America | Mexico | Standard | 49 |
Florida | Miami | Obfuscated Standard | 5 63 |
Italy | Milan | Obfuscated Standard | 2 63 |
Canada | Montreal | Double VPN Standard | 7 146 |
India | Mumbai | Standard | 20 |
New York | New York | Double VPN Obfuscated Standard | 9 21 331 |
Cyprus | Nicosia | Standard | 9 |
Norway | Oslo | Standard | 51 |
Florida | Panama City | Standard | 1 |
France | Paris | Dedicated IP Double VPN Obfuscated Standard | 2 2 11 205 |
Australia | Perth | Standard | 30 |
Arizona | Phoenix | Standard | 63 |
Czech Republic | Prague | Standard | 33 |
Iceland | Reykjavik | Standard | 10 |
Latvia | Riga | Standard | 15 |
Utah | Salt Lake City | Standard | 35 |
California | San Francisco | Standard | 70 |
Chile | Santiago | Standard | 13 |
Brazil | Sao Paulo | Standard | 21 |
Washington | Seattle | Standard | 111 |
New Jersey | Secaucus | Standard | 21 |
South Korea | Seoul | Standard | 11 |
Asia | Singapore | Obfuscated Standard | 12 55 |
Macedonia | Skopje | Standard | 2 |
Bulgaria | Sofia | Standard | 17 |
Bosnia and Herzegovina | Sarajevo | Standard | 3 |
Missouri | St. Louis | Standard | 55 |
Luxembourg | Steinsel | Standard | 19 |
Sweden | Stockholm | DoubleVPN Obfuscated Standard | 3 4 121 |
Australia | Sydney | Standard | 51 |
Taiwan | Taipei | DoubleVPN Standard | 1 123 |
Estonia | Tallinn | Standard | 13 |
Georgia | Tbilisi | Standard | 4 |
Israel | Tel Aviv | Standard | 18 |
Albania | Tirana | Standard | 3 |
Japan | Tokyo | Standard | 76 |
Canada | Toronto | Black Hole Obfuscated Standard | 4 4 181 |
Austria | Vienna | Standard | 32 |
Poland | Warsaw | Standard | 54 |
Croatia | Zagreb | Standard | 8 |
Switzerland | Zurich | Double VPN Obfuscated Standard | 3 1 96 |
You can see the complete list of servers from NordVPN’s website. NordVPN is very transparent about the number of servers it has and where they are located.
Which Country Has the Best Servers?
Although all servers should expectedly be good in any server network, not all VPN services can afford to offer the same server types in every location.
For example, servers in the United States or in China are worth a lot more than in countries with smaller populations, like Micronesia or Papua New Guinea. It has nothing to do with the economy of a given country; it all depends on usage.
Most VPN users are looking to choose from a list of servers to change their IP address—and by extension, their location—to the United States or the United Kingdom so they can access US Netflix and BBC iPlayer from any location in the world, even if it’s far in proximity to the United States or United Kingdom.
In the same way, many VPN users are looking for security in places such as the British Virgin Islands, Romania and Hong Kong. All of these locations are high value, so it makes sense for a VPN service to put in the resources to make the servers at these locations the fastest, compared to other servers in the list of locations.
At the same time, people in countries with restrictive internet access, such as North Korea or Iran, are looking to connect to outside servers so they can experience a free and open internet.
With that said, most VPN services keep their best servers in the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands. So if you have no preference or need of your own, you’re better off connecting to servers in these three countries.
Be careful about the opposite situation as well. Because locations like the United States and the United Kingdom are in such high demand, many of the servers present could be overloaded and slow.
Pro Tip:
So if you don’t want to access US Netflix but only want privacy and security, then you should connect to a server in a country such as Singapore, Japan, Costa Rica, the United Arab Emirates or the Czech Republic.There is no single best country for a VPN server. Apart from the factors we mentioned above, your own physical location is very important as well.
All other things being equal, the closer a given server is to your own location, the better speed it will provide. However, you can’t get too close to your physical location; otherwise, you would have to use the same restricted internet as before.
So if you live in Australia and want some security/privacy, then do not connect to a server in the United States or in the United Kingdom, where servers could be slow. Instead, look for a server in New Zealand or Indonesia.
Even if you want to watch US Netflix in Australia, you should see which side of the United States is closer to your location and then connect to a server that’s closest to you on the NordVPN server list by state. You can also select from the NordVPN server list by city.
Following these guidelines, you can connect to the best NordVPN server in the best country no matter where you are.
Conclusion
is one of the best Virtual Private Network service providers in the world because it offers advanced security features, a money-back guarantee and a solid privacy policy. But what sets NordVPN apart from the crowd is its huge server network.Unlike most other VPN service providers, Nord VPN does not attempt to solve all problems with a single all-purpose server. Instead, it has specialized server types meant for different tasks. This makes NordVPN perform better than its peers at satisfying customers looking for fast downloads in heavily restricted regions such as China and Iran.
Feel free to use the comments section below to share your experience with NordVPN servers and whether they worked for you, especially in the list of regions above.