Proton claims it has
7470 Plus servers in 112 countries
But 73 of those “servers” use Smart Routing, meaning you are actually connecting to another VPN server but your IP appears to be from the fake VPN server you are connecting to .
So, Proton only has about 40 real servers.
What are more people looking for when they’re comparing the location count of VPNs? Do people care about where their IP address appears to be, or do they care about their physical proximity to the server?
For some it may be both, but my guess is that most people care about the first thing more. If that’s the case then Proton’s solution here still gives an accurate country count, because that is indeed the number of countries you can appear to be located within based on your IP.
I just counted and 73 servers out of their 113 are in fact not servers, but rather use Smart Routing to redirect to other countries, mostly France. This is highly misleading. Someone in let’s say Africa will look at their website, and say “Oh great, they have nearby servers”, while in fact, it is on another continent. ( I take this example cause Africa has very few VPN servers).
Plus, even PG says choosing a nearby server is best for latency.
I also want to point out that the countries count is supposed to be an indicator of the size of the VPN infrastructure.
Servers are physically located in France, but you’ll appear to be browsing from Iraq.
Everything is very clearly explained.
On their app, yes.
Their website say otherwise though:
Source
Proton VPN has 7470 Plus servers in 112 countries, exclusive for Plus users.
Not sure why they don’t show this information on the website, but they still do have the most amount of servers in the most amount of countries when compared to IVPN and Mullvad.
Misleading marketing?
This is false. Mullvad has real/physical servers in 47 countries, compared to Proton’s 40. In raw number of servers, they do have more. But not in terms of countries.
