I am confused on how ProtonVPN chooses Servers. When I choose fastest it seems to almost always choose a server in New York despite the fact I live maybe 100 miles from Chicago where all IL servers reside. Wouldn’t you think the fastest server for me be the ones based in IL and not NY? This is being done on Windows ProtonVPN client. My other devices all go straight to Chicago servers.
It’s not necessarily proximity, routing is based on traffic as I understand. If protonvpn deems the fastest way to the internet is through NY over the network, then it doesn’t matter if a server is physically closer.
I asked ProtonVPN support about this exact subject not too long ago. The gist of their answer was they don’t use location or amount of server load as the sole basis on quick connect. According to then the server load doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of users are connected to it. Their algorithm is supposed to find the best connection.
In practice it doesn’t always work, I ended up sometimes just doing search for closest server and connecting to that maybe you need to do that with Chicago servers. I have had same problem where I live in northeast us and am connected to Dallas all the time.
I’m in New Zealand and I’ve recently started being connected to India servers, I only noticed because YouTube ads on my phone were 100% get rich quick schemes, even when I wasn’t watching finance videos.
The same thing happens to me with my Pixel and Windows. What I’ve done to mitigate that is create a profile with one of the servers in my state after checking a few to see which had the lightest load consistently. Then when I want to be in state I connect to that one and when I don’t care I go fastest. One of the servers is in Utah and I can’t get to my liquor store website. And forget about adult entertainment. /jk naturally
I think it is mainly based on ping and later on traffic load. Generally speaking, high ping is worst then slow speed for web surfing.