Who sees your traffic
Right now, somebody can see the name of every website you open. Not what you typed. Just the name, and the time.
This page shows you who that somebody is, and what a VPN changes about it.
How does the company make money?
Servers cost money every month. If you are not paying, that money comes from somewhere — very often from selling the browsing data you came to protect. Be careful with free VPNs.
One connection, four parties
Press the buttons to see what each one learns when you open a health website on public Wi-Fi.
3of these four can see which websites you open
The public Wi-Fi
Whoever runs the router
A list of every website you opened, with the time — healthsite.com, 4:14 pm. Not your password. Not what was on the page. Just the list.
Your internet provider
The company behind that Wi-Fi
The same list, saved under your name and your account. To find a website your phone has to say its name out loud first, so they hear every one of them.
The VPN provider
In the path only when you switch it on
Nothing. There is no VPN here yet. Your traffic goes straight from the public Wi-Fi to the internet company.
The website
The service you opened
Your real address on the internet. It shows your city and your internet company. And if you are logged in, it already knows your name.
One thing does not change either way: if you are logged in, the website knows it is you. And what you typed stayed sealed the whole time.
Think of it like posting a letter
You are on public Wi-Fi somewhere — a café, a hotel lobby, the airport, your college. You open something on your phone. It feels private; nobody is reading over your shoulder.
But your request does not jump straight to that website. It goes to that Wi-Fi first. From there to the internet company the Wi-Fi pays. Only then does it reach the website. Three sets of hands before it even arrives.
Now, the good news. What you send is sealed, like a letter inside an envelope. Your password, your messages, your bank balance — nobody along the way can open it and read it. Almost every website does this now, automatically. It is already done, and a VPN is not what does it.
Here is the part nobody mentions. Everybody who carries that envelope can still read the address on the outside. They know who you wrote to, and when. One letter tells them little. A year of letters tells them a great deal.
A VPN hides the address. It was never about the letter.
When this actually matters
Most of the time, honestly, it does not. You check the cricket score on your own phone data and nothing about that needs protecting. It starts to matter in two situations: when you do not know the people carrying your traffic, and when appearing from the wrong city creates a real problem for you.
Public Wi-Fi in cafés, hotels, airports and colleges
The Wi-Fi is free and the password is written on the wall. You have no idea who set that router up, or whether anybody ever looks at what it keeps. What it keeps is a list of the websites every phone in the room has opened. With a VPN, your share of that list becomes one sealed connection and nothing else.
Working for clients abroad
You work for a company in another country. One morning their system decides it does not recognise you and asks you to prove who you are, again. The sites you get paid through are worse — some simply refuse and explain nothing. Arriving from the same place every day keeps you looking like the same person.
Internet you do not pay for
In a shared flat or a hostel, the router belongs to whoever pays the bill. That person can see what the network is doing, and the tools to do it are cheap and easy. Nobody has to mean any harm for that to feel wrong.
Apps that stop working abroad
You land in another country, open your bank app, and it refuses. Government portals do the same, usually at the worst possible moment. Connecting through home first makes them behave the way they did last week.
Things that are nobody else's business
Some nights you look up a symptom. Or a lawyer. Or a new job, while you still have the old one. Nobody can read the page you opened. But the name of the website, at eleven at night, tells the story well enough on its own.
Four more questions before you pay anyone
Using a VPN means handing your traffic to a company. So which company is not part of the decision — it is the whole decision. Ask these four questions. Ask them of us, and ask them of everyone else you are considering.
What do they write down about you?
Not the big words on the front page — the actual policy. What is saved, for how long, and what would they hand over if someone official asked?
Which country's laws do they follow?
That country decides who can force them to hand over your data, and what rights you have if they misuse it.
Has anyone outside the company checked?
An audit is when a company pays outside experts to inspect it and publish what they found. Not having one does not make a company bad — having one is proof it was willing to be checked.
What happens if the VPN drops?
Connections fail sometimes. Without a kill switch, your phone quietly goes back to the normal connection and keeps working — and you will never notice you are no longer protected.
Words you will hear
- IP address
- Your address on the internet, like a house number. Every website you open sees it. It shows your city and your internet company.
- DNS
- Like asking directions. Your phone says a website's name out loud to find out where it is — and whoever carries that question hears the name.
- The padlock
- The small lock in your browser. It seals what is inside the page, so nobody on the way can read it. It does not hide which page you opened.
- Kill switch
- A setting that cuts your internet completely if the VPN stops working, so nothing slips out through the normal connection by accident.
- No-logs
- A company promising it does not keep a record of what you do. Different companies mean different things by it, so read what they actually wrote.
- Server
- A computer belonging to the VPN company, in some city, that your traffic passes through. The website sees that computer instead of you.
So why pay for one at all?
Because the smaller, honest reason is still a good reason. On a stranger's Wi-Fi, in a flat where somebody else owns the router, or on a night you would rather keep to yourself, the list of where you went is nobody's business but yours.
VPN Nepal handles your traffic under European data protection law, which is the strictest in the world: it limits what we may keep, how long we may keep it, and it gives you the right to demand a copy or have it deleted. Do not take that on trust — it is written down in our privacy policy.
We would rather you learned the limits on this page than found them out later. If anything here does not match what someone else has told you, come and ask us about it.
This guide describes how VPNs work in general. It is not legal advice, and it does not describe the configuration of any particular network.