VPN Provider’s Guide on How to Reduce Ping

In the hyper-competitive market, distinguishing your service is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.

While security and privacy remain fundamentals, a VPN’s quality often comes down to one critical factor: speed. Today’s end-users expect a seamless, uninterrupted online experience. The slightest lag or buffering can be the difference between a loyal customer and a lost one.

At the heart of this experience lies “ping,” a key metric that determines the responsiveness of a connection. Maintaining a low ping rate is crucial.

Failing to deliver a fast, reliable network can undermine your credibility and hinder your growth in becoming a world-class provider.

That’s why we’ve created this guide.

We will demystify how to reduce ping and provide actionable strategies to help you optimise your VPN service for maximum performance and user satisfaction.

What Causes High Ping for VPNs

Several factors can contribute to a high ping, impacting VPN performance. For providers, understanding these is the first step towards rectifying them.

Server Infrastructure

Delivering a low-latency VPN experience starts with strategic server network design.

The geographical proximity of your server to the end-user is critical; greater physical distance inherently increases ping as data packets have further to travel.

A key differentiator is the ability to offer a geographically diverse network of high-performance servers, enabling users to connect locally with minimal disruption.

Beyond location, server hardware specifications, including processing power, memory, and network interface speed, may directly impact their ability to handle traffic efficiently.

Sub-optimal hardware may become a bottleneck, negating the advantage of a nearby server.

Additionally, overloaded servers with too many concurrent users could increase latency and degrade user experience.

Proactive load balancing and investment in quality infrastructure are essential to maintaining low ping and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Network Congestion

When data volume exceeds network capacity, especially during peak hours, throughput decreases, and network performance suffers.

For users, this manifests as higher ping and slower connections.

Sub-Optimal Infrastructure

Opting not to prioritise a high-performance network with robust connectivity and low-latency hardware could affect your ability to provide a fast and reliable VPN service.

Even with strategically located servers, performance may be hampered by sub-optimal hardware and network architecture.

Inadequate server hardware, including insufficient processing power (CPU) and memory (RAM), may create significant bottlenecks.

Additionally, outdated or poorly configured routers and network hardware may disrupt throughput, leading to higher latency and unreliable connections.

How to Improve Ping on VPNs

High ping can frustrate users and degrade the overall performance of your VPN service, especially in latency-sensitive applications like gaming, video conferencing, or real-time collaboration.

Some of the causes may leave you scratching your head, but the following strategies work to help you deliver a smoother, faster VPN experience.

Deploy VPN Nodes Closer to End Users with Global Cloud Regions

Cloud platforms offer low-latency global infrastructure, enabling VPN providers to deploy servers near key user locations with minimal effort.

Instead of relying on a handful of centralised data centres, providers can leverage distributed cloud regions to reduce the physical distance that packets must travel.

This directly cuts down the number of network hops, helping lower ping and providing a competitive edge.

Use Lightweight and Modern VPN Protocols

VPN protocol choice plays a major role in latency. Legacy protocols introduce overhead through complex handshakes and heavier encryption layers.

In contrast, modern protocols are designed for speed and efficiency.

Upgrading to lightweight protocols may significantly improve performance across desktop and mobile clients, making your VPN more responsive and suitable for real-time applications.

Integrate Cloud-Native Load Balancers to Optimise Traffic Flow

Cloud-native global load balancers work to route users to the nearest or least-congested VPN node based on real-time latency, location, or capacity.

This optimises reliability and ping, even during traffic surges or server failures, which directly translates to better customer retention and satisfaction.

Consider Bare Metal Servers

For performance-critical scenarios, bare metal servers work to provide consistency and lower ping.

Unlike virtual machines, bare metal servers offer dedicated hardware, eliminating virtualisation overhead, which as a results works to provide stable, predictable performance.

This is especially valuable in high-throughput, low-latency environments such as gaming, financial trading, or enterprise-grade remote access.

Strategically deploying bare metal servers in key regions may help minimise jitter, reduce packet loss, and deliver a smoother user experience with faster response times.

If you’re looking to give your users the ultra-low latency they expect, THG’s global cloud infrastructure is built to help you do exactly that.

Explore our VPN solutions and discover how we work to help you cut ping, in order to support your performance, and scale your offering globally.