So when Proton VPN announced that they had hit 11,000 servers, I realised that it has been a long time since I have done one of these reviews of how they have been expanding their network, so I warmed up the Wayback machine again and got scraping.
It was almost exactly a year ago that Proton really started expanding rapidly, and the growth has been fairly constant since then, more than tripling from 3,437 servers in March 2024 to 11,799 now in March 2025. They’ve been averaging around 700 additional servers a month, so if this rate of growth continues, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 20,000 server announcement around this time next year.
Having a lot of servers is not by itself necessarily an inherently useful thing. More interesting is where those servers have been going over the past year:
Number of locations has increased from 96 to 154. 46 of those were from the new countries added (increasing from 71 countries to 117) but the other 12 were from additional locations in existing countries - including three additional new cities in the USA and adding Dublin, Edinburgh and Cardiff in the UK.
Proton VPN paid servers have been added to almost every previously covered country, most notably an extra 268 in Germany, 363 in Canada, 368 in Switzerland, 427 in the United Kingdom, and a huge 1600 additional paid servers in the USA.
Other smaller countries have seen a large relative increase in paid servers, such as Turkey (x4.5 to 36), Brazil (x4.5 to 108), Ukraine (x8 to 64), and Mexico (x 9.5 to 76).
Particularly interesting is the number of free VPN servers in the overall server mix. This had been sitting around the 300 mark for the first half of 2024, and then suddenly tripled around August before dropping back and then growing again to around 3000.
For comparison, over the same time period ExpressVPN and Surfshark have remained stagnant at around 3000 and 3200 respectively. Nord has grown a more respectable +23% from 6000 servers to 7400, but this is still well behind Proton’s growth rate.
I’ll be adding some more analysis in the comments.
Due to Reddit comment length limitations I’ll be breaking this list up into a couple of different posts, but the following list shows the 9 countries that had more than 100 paid Proton VPN servers added over the past 12 months.
If you want to check my previous posts on this for reference:
March 30, 2024: growth graph from when hitting 4,400 servers and 91 countries seemed exciting)
July 6, 2024: growth graph when they cracked 6,300 servers and 100 counties)
August 27, 2024: global heatmap showing the number of servers by country from when they hit 112 countries and 6,600 servers.
Looking back, I see in a comment on that last post I had predicted that the next additions based on past requests would be Armenia, Mongolia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Gabon, and Scotland.
The second part of the list of countries adding 100+ paid servers, here are the ones where Proton added 50-100 new paid VPN servers over the past 12 months.
Of the 46 new countries that Proton VPN added over the past 12 months, some have had substantially more paid servers added than others. Presumably this is an indication of the relative levels of demand for servers in those countries. 27 of these new countries are presently running with 2-4 servers, with the other 19 running between 8 (Bhutan) and 119 (Venezuela):
Country
Total Servers
Venezuela
119
El Salvador
53
Nepal
52
Sri Lanka
52
Algeria
28
Belarus
28
Chad
28
Mauritania
28
Mozambique
28
Qatar
28
Senegal
28
South Sudan
28
Togo
28
Rwanda
27
Azerbaijan
24
Bangladesh
24
Albania
15
Bosnia & Herzegovina
10
Bhutan
8
The remaining new countries with only 4 servers are Angola, Bahrain, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritius, Montenegro, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Afghanistan has the fewest with 2 VPN servers.
yo dude, not to break the ekcitement becouse it is exciting, but you need the starting point for the countries to be 0 and not 65. That way you are making it look like a bigger increase than what it really is. Just like you did with servers
Still unusable for me because they don’t offer physical servers in my country, only “Smart Routing.” Hence, I’m getting around 200ms of latency when connected to my own country. Great product, but hoping for more physical servers and better Linux support.
We operate ~1000 servers (IPinfo). Even though this is fantastic progress, I am bit doubtful about the number of servers that are actually physically located in the advertised location.
Proton says this server is located in Nepal. Getting a server in Nepal is incredibly difficult and we have not been able get a server still. So, how did Proton get a server in Nepal? This is where Virtual server, Virtual Point of Presence servers or in Proton’s case Smart Routing come into play.
They buy server somewhere and they submit geofeed pointing the server to be located in Nepal or any location they want to various IP geolocation providers.
Example:
146.70.252.0/24,NP,,Kathmandu,44600
But as we (IPinfo) only report active measurement-based IP geolocation, the location submitted to us by ISP or ASN is invalid. Even though most IP geolocation providers will repeat what Proton or ASN says about the “virtual location,” only the physical location of the server matters to us. The physical location of the server is determined by our servers, which are actually located across 400 cities.
One way you can verify the location of an IP address is by using a multi-server ping service like ping.sx. If you ping the Nepalese Proton IP address from servers distributed across the world, you will see the lowest RTT from the server closest by. In this case, the closest server to the server is in Singapore, matching our data.
Not taking anything away from the accomplishment, but I wanted to share insights as we operate one of the most massive and location diversified networks of servers out there.
All these servers are waste of time until unless there’s a ready to be installed .deb package for Linux users. They provide Security Key along with Server linked Package instead. It’s not accessible in case of strict ISP filtering only. So there’s no way to use it even from within Tor Browser as no ‘TLS handshake’ gets through established client connection. Nobody hears me on it… And yes, I’ve Proton VPN up and running. Used third party VPN to set it up .
True, but when I did that the graph formatting got ugly. The country count overlay started to obscure the server growth details. I just managed to avoid that for August 2024 by having the axis extend to 150 countries to compress it back down.
