What Are the Pros & Cons of Using a VPN? Full 2025 Guide by Tim Mocan

VPNs are essential for protecting your privacy while torrenting. They hide your P2P traffic, which means your ISP can’t see it anymore — so they’re less likely to throttle it, or send you cease and desist letters.

In addition, VPNs prevent anyone in the torrent swarm (the total number of people downloading and uploading a torrent) from seeing your real IP address. Only the IP address of the VPN will be visible. This prevents malicious actors from using your IP address to track your location. It also keeps you safe from lawyers or copyright trolls — they could use your IP to find your ISP, contact it, ask it to hand over your contact details, and threaten you with legal action if you don’t agree to an expensive settlement.

If you’re interested in using a VPN for torrenting, I recommend checking out our list of the best P2P VPNs in 2025.

Bandwidth throttling is when your ISP intentionally slows down your internet speeds for certain online activities — like streaming movies and TV shows, downloading files, or playing online games. ISPs might do this at peak network usage hours, like at night or over the weekend, but a VPN can help you avoid this.

ISPs throttle online activities that use a lot of data to optimize network data usage and speeds for all users. While this makes sense, it’s still really inconvenient to experience it — basically, your videos might start randomly buffering, or you might start experiencing frequent disconnects when gaming online.

Your ISP can throttle your bandwidth because all of your traffic goes through its network. It’s able to see exactly what sites you access, and which online services you use — and how much data you use on each one of them.

But a VPN can prevent bandwidth throttling. It encrypts your web traffic, which makes it unreadable — so your ISP can’t monitor it anymore. Due to that, it can’t selectively throttle your speeds for certain online activities.

Using a VPN while gaming might stabilize or even lower your ping. Basically, you’d need to connect to a VPN server that’s in the same country as the gaming server. If you do that, the VPN server might route your traffic to the gaming server via a more direct route. In turn, that would mean you exchange data with the gaming server faster, which would result in lower or more stable ping.

You could also use a VPN while gaming to:

• Avoid Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks are cyber attacks that flood your network with so much traffic that you lose internet access, sometimes for hours on end. Sore losers or wannabe hackers could use DDoS attacks against you as a form of revenge for beating them at the game. DDoS attacks work by targeting your IP address — and since a VPN hides your IP, it protects you against DDoS attacks.
• Get around IP bans. Since VPNs hide your real IP address, you can use them to get around unfair IP bans.
• Game on restrictive networks. VPNs could allow you to game on networks that might use firewalls to block online games, like school or campus firewalls. Basically, the VPN lets you connect to the game via its IP address, which doesn’t have any firewall rules attached to it.
• Increase your chances of finding bot lobbies. If you use a VPN to hide your location, you might get better odds of ending up in a bot lobby that offers an easier matchup. This way, you could improve your skills at the game.

By hiding your real location, VPNs could help you get discounts when making online purchases: for example, when you book an airplane ticket or a hotel, when you buy a video game, or when you rent a car.

This happens because many prices are location-based. Some online sellers and retailers adjust their prices based on the country their users are from to optimize their profits. For example, they might charge someone from a higher-income country more because they know they can afford it.

A VPN might help you get discounts when making online purchases, but keep in mind this isn’t 100% guaranteed to happen. It’s a lot of trial and error, really. For instance, if you want to use a VPN to get cheaper plane tickets, you’d have to try different things — like connecting to a lower-income country or to the country the airline is headquartered in.

Most good VPNs have apps for all popular platforms — Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Many top providers also have apps for smart TVs, such as Android TV, Fire TV, and Apple TV.

That said, there are plenty of devices that don’t support VPN apps — basically, you just can’t download and install a VPN app on them. Some examples include routers, certain smart TV models, and gaming consoles.

In such a situation, you would need to configure the VPN on your router (you can do this via a manual setup). Once you do that, all the web-connected devices in your home that use the router will automatically use the VPN that’s set up on it.

Many banking platforms will block you if you connect to them using a VPN connection. This usually happens because VPNs use shared server IP addresses by default — this means that all the users connected to the server share the same IP address. This is meant to provide privacy, but a banking site could flag the shared IP as a security concern. So, it blacklists the IP.

The solution to this is to use a VPN with dedicated IP addresses. That’s an IP address that only you use, so the banking platform won’t flag and blacklist it. To use a dedicated IP, you’ll normally need to pay for it.

CAPTCHA requests are tests that website visitors and search engine users are asked to perform sometimes to prove they are not bots. Online platforms use CAPTCHA requests to protect themselves against spam and malicious actors.

Unfortunately, search engines and websites might flag shared VPN IP addresses as malicious. So, they force the VPN users using said IPs to complete CAPTCHA requests. This can happen very often. For example, I tried using Surfshark to look up 4 different things on Google when writing this article, and I had to complete CAPTCHA requests for 3 of my searches.

The only way to prevent this is to use a VPN that has a dedicated IP address. Surfshark has dedicated IPs, and once I got one, I never saw any more CAPTCHA requests when browsing the web.

VPN apps could add to your device’s battery and data consumption. They increase battery consumption because you have to leave the VPN app running in the background. And they eat up more data because the VPN constantly exchanges encrypted and decrypted data with the web.

There’s no industry standard for how much a VPN increases battery and data consumption. I’d really only recommend keeping an eye on this if your mobile data plan is very restrictive, or if your battery is almost dead. In such situations, it’s best to only use the VPN when you really need to.

The only pro is that the free VPN doesn’t cost anything upfront. However, free VPNs come with many drawbacks — slow speeds, poor security and privacy, buggy apps, and restrictive data caps. It’s much better to just get a premium VPN instead, like ExpressVPN for example.

The main advantage is that VPNs stop your internet service provider from throttling your bandwidth. VPNs also improve your streaming, gaming, and torrenting experience, and secure your web traffic. If you’d like to try a VPN for your home network, I recommend checking out ExpressVPN.

The main reason to do this is to secure your web traffic. Public Wi-Fi networks often don’t encrypt your traffic, which means malicious actors can easily monitor it to steal your data. But if you use a VPN, your public Wi-Fi data is encrypted, preventing anyone from spying on it.

There aren’t many scenarios where it makes sense to not use one. Generally, people avoid using them when their original internet speeds are too slow, as VPNs further slow them down. Also, some people avoid VPNs when connecting to their banking sites, as most bank sites block VPN connections.