Millions of people around the world use Proton VPN to stream their favorite shows, protect their privacy, or access censored content when their internet is restricted. We want to ensure that when you need a VPN, we’re able to deliver a smooth, quick, and reliable experience.
This is why we’re introducing streamlined server lists, where only a subset of all 15,000+ servers that are available to you will be displayed in our apps. With this change, Proton can grow with our ever-expanding community and meet any new challenges that lie ahead.
So what’s happening?
Until now, everyone with a paid Proton VPN account could see every VPN server on our network. This is changing.
With our new streamlined server lists, you’ll see a smaller subset of our servers. You’ll see the same streamlined server list across all platforms as this list is tied to your Proton VPN account.
You can still access all our servers and features
Although the selection of servers displayed in each app is not the full list of all our servers, you’ll still see many (potentially hundreds) of server options for each country. Each list will include:
- Servers in every country, state, and city that we support.
- At least one server in every individual city or state that supports every feature available for that location
- At least one Secure Core option for each supported country.
- At least one Tor server for each supported country.
You can still connect to any of our servers:
- Any server you’ve recently used will show in your Recents list and can be pinned to your Home screen on Proton VPN apps that support these features.
- If you have a particular favorite server, you can search for it by name (we’re working to bring this feature to all our apps).
- You can add any server to a custom connection profile for easy access in most apps.
A better experience for you
Thanks to this change, it’s now much easier to find a server that meets your needs. You should also start to notice other key benefits:
- Faster app loading times
- More accurate server load information
- Quicker connection times
- Less battery drain
- Fewer app crashes and freezes
Why is this change needed?
From humble beginnings in 2017, Proton VPN now operates one of the largest server networks in the world, and is relied upon by millions of people to protect their privacy and ensure free access to the internet. With this success comes new challenges, the most important of which are:
- Scalability: A network infrastructure originally developed to serve the needs of a community of thousands, will inevitably struggle to serve the needs of a community of millions.
- Resilience: Our increased size is bringing us to attention of restrictive governments who want to monitor and restrict the freedoms of their citizens. This means Proton VPN increasingly has a target on its back.
And as we grow, these challenges will only become more pronounced. Streamlining our server lists is a key part of our strategy for meeting these challenges.
Scalability
To meet the demands of a growing Proton VPN community, we expanded our server network from 5,000+ VPN servers in over 90 countries in June 2014 to 15,000+ servers in 127+ countries in November 2025.
And as our community grows, the resources needed to support it grows exponentially (roughly speaking, if our community doubles in size, our computational costs quadruple).
Last year, we calculated that each device connected to our network downloaded at least 11 MB of data per day for the server list alone, and an additional 90 MB for fetching load information updates. As Proton VPN grows, this is unsustainable.
Loading our entire server list every time you open one of our apps is unnecessary and:
- Makes it harder to select a server
- Makes the app less responsive (so it can feel “laggy”)
- Puts strain on our server infrastructure, making it harder to ensure every server’s status and load information is up-to-date
However, all these problems can be effectively addressed by simply loading a smaller server list.
Scale also causes problems on a more human level. We often see surges in the use of our service in response to global events. When this happens, many people often try to connect to our lowest-load servers, resulting in them quickly becoming overloaded. They then try to connect to other servers instead, creating a global “wave” that can destabilize our entire server network. A notable example of this was the 2024 unrest in Bangladesh.
So far, we’ve been able to manage such events, but streamlined server lists will help as our network expands. Because everyone sees a different subset of servers, it’s much less likely that any particular server will become overloaded.
Resilience
Until now, a repressive government could learn (and therefore block) the IP address of every one of our VPN servers by purchasing a single VPN Plus subscription. However, with our simplified lists, very few people will see the same server list, making it much harder for repressive governments to discover and block our servers.
In addition to this, we currently cache the entire server list on your device to provide reliance in the event that access to our backend API is blocked, which helps contribute to the performance gains listed above. With streamlined server lists, much less data will need to be cached.
A more robust network for us, a better experience for you
The introduction of streamlined server lists helps to ensure that Proton VPN is ready to serve our growing community and face whatever challenges lie ahead. This simplified setup also lightens the load on our customer support, engineering, and infrastructure teams, leading to:
- Faster support resolution when issues arise.
- More frequent infrastructure updates.
- Faster bug resolution and development of new features.
- The ability to implement stability improvements that weren’t possible beforehand.
Proton VPN exists to serve our community, and streamlined server lists allow us to do this better. Our engineers are currently doing the complex foundational work needed for these improvements, and you many notice some minor changes and hiccups as we roll this out. However, it will lead to to a better VPN experience for everyone as we continue to build the world’s best and most-trusted VPN.
