In July 2023, a software engineer traveling from London to Tokyo opened his laptop at his hotel, logged into his streaming account, and found that half of his saved watch list had vanished because the hotel router assigned him a Japanese IP address (133.242.x.x).

How Websites Know Where You Are

When you connect to a website, your request contains a source IP address. Servers do not measure physical distance to find you. Instead, they query geolocation databases managed by providers like MaxMind, IPinfo, or DB-IP. These databases index IP blocks allocated by the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), such as APNIC in the Asia-Pacific region or RIPE NCC in Europe.

Your IP address acts like a digital postal code. Within milliseconds, a host can match your IP to a specific country, city, and Internet Service Provider (ISP).

To change your perceived location, your network traffic must route through an intermediary server positioned in your desired target destination. When the target server receives your request, it sees the IP address of that intermediary rather than your original endpoint. Three primary tools accomplish this, each operating with distinct underlying protocols, performance profiles, and security trade-offs.

Let’s look at the most versatile method first: virtual private networks.

Method 1: Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) — System-Wide Encryption

A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and a remote server operated by the VPN provider. When connected to a server in Frankfurt, every packet originating from your operating system—whether from Chrome, Spotify, or a background system process—is encapsulated and encrypted before leaving your network interface.

Modern VPN protocols like WireGuard rely on state-of-the-art cryptography (such as ChaCha20 for symmetric encryption and Poly1305 for authentication). This protocol efficiency keeps performance overhead low, typically adding only 15 to 30 milliseconds of latency and reducing bandwidth by less than 15% under optimal conditions.

To understand how these encrypted tunnels operate at the packet level, read our breakdown of how a VPN works.

The Trade-Offs of VPNs

Datacenter IP Flagging: Streaming providers and fraud detection systems monitor commercial IP ranges. If thousands of users access a service from a single server hosted in an AWS or DigitalOcean datacenter, that IP is quickly blacklisted.
DNS Leaks: If your operating system routes domain resolution requests outside the VPN tunnel to your local ISP’s DNS servers, your physical location can be inferred. You can learn more about this in our guide to DNS leaks explained.

If system-wide encryption is unnecessary and speed is your top priority for a single application, proxies offer a lightweight alternative.

Method 2: Proxy Servers — Application-Specific Relays

Unlike a VPN, a proxy server operates at the application layer or transport layer without creating a system-wide encrypted tunnel. You configure proxies directly inside individual applications, such as a web browser, a torrent client, or a web scraper.

Proxies generally fall into two categories:

HTTP/HTTPS Proxies: These understand and interpret web traffic. They inspect HTTP headers and relay GET/POST requests. However, they are restricted purely to web browsing protocol stacks.
SOCKS5 Proxies: Operating at Layer 5 of the OSI model, SOCKS5 proxies handle any traffic type (UDP or TCP) across arbitrary ports (typically defaulting to port 1080). They do not interpret the network traffic, making them faster and more flexible for non-web software.

Feature	VPN	Proxy (SOCKS5)
Traffic Scope	Entire Operating System	Specific Application
Encryption	End-to-end tunnel encryption	None by default (depends on underlying protocol)
Latency Penalty	~15 - 30 ms	~5 - 15 ms
Setup Complexity	Native desktop/mobile apps	Manual IP/Port configuration

The primary downside of proxies is privacy. Standard proxies do not encrypt the traffic between your device and the proxy server. If you use an unencrypted HTTP proxy on public Wi-Fi, anyone sniffing local Wi-Fi packets can read your data in plaintext. For a deeper breakdown of protocol differences, see our comparison of VPN vs Proxy.

When privacy and complete anonymity outweigh all speed requirements, the Tor network provides a vastly different architecture.

Method 3: The Tor Network — Multi-Hop Anonymity

Tor (The Onion Router) relies on a peer-to-peer overlay network designed specifically to resist traffic analysis and surveillance. Instead of routing traffic through a single intermediary server, Tor routes your data through three randomly selected nodes:

Guard/Entry Node: Knows your real IP address but cannot see the content or destination.
Middle Relay: Receives encrypted data from the Guard node and passes it along. Knows neither your real IP nor the destination.
Exit Node: Decrypts the final layer of encryption and delivers the request to the target website. The target website sees only the Exit Node’s IP address.

Each node only knows the identity of the node immediately before and after it. Data is encrypted in three layers, stripped away step-by-step like an onion.