How to choose a VPN location

For most people the right VPN location is the nearest city that has spare capacity, because that keeps the added latency small and does everything a VPN does for privacy just as well as a distant one. Choose a specific country only when you have a reason to appear to be there, such as checking how your own website behaves for a visitor from it. The picker shows a measured round trip and a headroom figure for every city precisely so you can make that call with numbers rather than a guess.

Start with what you want the VPN for

There are really only three reasons to pick one location over another, and they pull in different directions.

Privacy on the network you are on. If the goal is that the hotel, campus, office or café network cannot see where your traffic goes, every location does that equally well. The moment the tunnel is up, the local network sees one encrypted stream to one address, and it does not matter whether that address is in Amsterdam or Singapore.

Speed. Every kilometre between you and the server adds to the round trip, roughly a millisecond per 100 km in each direction, and every packet you send goes out to the server and back before it reaches the site you are talking to. A server 300 km away adds a handful of milliseconds; one 8,000 km away adds well over a hundred. The ping versus bandwidth post explains why this matters more for interactive use than for downloads.

Appearing to be somewhere. Websites see the exit IP, which belongs to the country of the server. A site that adapts its language, currency, prices or features to where the visitor seems to be will adapt to the server's country. This is why a developer in Poland who wants to see what their own shop looks like to a customer in Singapore connects to Singapore and accepts the distance.

Read the two numbers, not the flag

A location row that shows only a flag and a signal-bar icon is asking you to guess. Culvert's picker shows two measured figures for each city instead, and they answer different questions.

The two combine in a way that is worth spelling out. A city 15 ms away with almost no headroom will feel slower than a city 30 ms away with plenty, because a loaded server queues your packets, and a queue adds delay that the round-trip figure, measured before you connect, does not show. That is the whole argument of how a good VPN app picks a server: distance is the floor, load is what sits on top of it.

A round trip far higher than the distance would suggest is worth noticing too. It usually means your traffic is taking a long route to get out of the network you are on, which is common on mobile data and on some hotel and campus networks, and it will affect every location, not just the one you are looking at.

Let the country row decide when you do not care

Tapping a country rather than a city hands the choice to the app: it connects to the lowest-latency healthy city in that country, and inside the city it picks the healthiest server itself. Individual servers are never shown, because a person who can pin a server will pin one, and then routine maintenance on that server becomes a visible failure instead of something that happens quietly. If you only want "somewhere in France", tap France.

Tap a city when you have a reason: it is the one you tested from last week, or the country has two cities and one shows more headroom. In Germany, for example, Saarbrücken is on the free tier and Limburg is on Premium, and the two are on separate networks, so a Premium user who sees one busy can simply take the other.

Free locations and how far they reach

Culvert's free tier has four cities in three countries: Amsterdam, Roubaix, Lauterbourg and Saarbrücken. All are in the north-west corner of Europe, within a few hundred kilometres of each other, so from anywhere between London, Paris, Frankfurt and Copenhagen at least one of them is within about 25 ms. From southern and eastern Europe they are 30–50 ms; from the Middle East, South Asia and South-East Asia, 100 ms and up, which is fine for browsing and noticeable for anything interactive.

Premium adds the rest: London, Saint Louis, Montreal, Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Gdansk, Istanbul, Dubai, Mumbai and Dhaka, plus Limburg in Germany. For someone in Asia or the Gulf, that is the difference between a server a continent away and one in the next country, which is the usual reason people there move to Premium. Each city has its own post with an honest latency table; the Singapore, Dubai and Mumbai posts are good places to start for those regions.

A quick decision procedure

1. Decide whether you need a particular country. If you do, choose it, tap the country row, and stop.
2. If not, open the picker and look at the round trips. Anything under about 30 ms will feel like no VPN at all for browsing; under 60 ms is fine for nearly everything.
3. Among the close cities, prefer the one with the most headroom. A few milliseconds of distance are cheaper than a queue.
4. If every round trip looks high, the problem is the network you are on rather than any location. Switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data and look again before changing city.
5. Once connected, check the exit IP on the connect screen. It is the address the app verified through the tunnel by asking Culvert's own server what it saw, and it should belong to the country you chose.

What choosing a location does not change

Your choice of city changes where your traffic comes out and how far it travels. It does not change what Culvert can see, which is the same in every location: the servers see only an opaque connection id, never an account, and Culvert does not log the sites you visit, your DNS queries or the contents of your traffic. It does keep the client IP address for up to 30 days for abuse handling, and optional app analytics if you leave that on. The privacy policy states this in full. Picking a far-away server does not make you more private; it only makes you slower.

Culvert VPN shows a measured round trip and a real headroom figure for every city before you connect, so the choice above takes a glance rather than a speed test; the app is on Google Play.