VPN Infrastructure Exposed: Who Really Runs Your VPN

Data center infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain. That’s why we have few large public clouds like AWS, Azure and GCP. As Signal’s president subtly put it: > The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3–4 players. So I’m not surprised VPN companies also share the same data center providers. Some VPN companies like Proton own some of their network and rent servers from third parties. IVPN uses dedicated servers (rented hardware) and co-located servers (owns hardware but housed in third-party data centers). Back in 2019, one of NordVPN’s rented servers was hacked because of an insecure remote management system left by the data center provider (Creanova) they didn’t know about. So VPN companies should thoroughly vet third-party data centers before they use them.