It felt like time to take another close look at what exactly Proton VPN has been up to recently. When I posted the last one of these graphs at the end of March, Proton VPN’s network had grown 43% in the space of three months, although 40% of the 1296 new servers that had been added were serving their country expansion rather than existing countries. Over the past three months, Proton VPN’s server count has grown another 42%. Of those 1871 new servers, almost all were for existing countries this time. The most notable winners were the USA (+878 servers), Canada (+210 servers), and Germany (+107 servers), although 42 countries had gains - I’ll add more details in the comments.
Some other observations:
Aside from the 9 new countries, Proton VPN also quietly added a new city to an existing country - Barcelona in Spain - following the addition of Marseille as a second city in France, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and Izmir in Turkey. This takes them up to 129 locations, Hopefully Proton will keep this up and add more US states and the other three countries of the United Kingdom.
I have also been keeping an eye on the other VPNs - Nord has added 400 servers so far this year (going from 6000 to 6400), but Express has stayed the same at around 3000 and Surfshark at 3200. That might be a sign that either the user base for those VPNs has stopped growing, or that their investors are demanding cost-cutting to improve profitability.
Adding so more capacity is all well and good, but is it boosting performance? Well it certainly seems to be. The speed benchmarking graph that Proton posted along with their 5000+ servers announcement shows Proton as one of the fastest, and sometimes THE fastest depending on the region. The other VPNs aren’t labelled, but after a bit of detective-work, I am 99% certain that the others are Cyberghost (yellow), Express (red), Nord (blue), and SurfShark (green). Interestingly, a claim that Nord, Surfshark and Proton have about the same speeds, and that Express is now painfully slow would be consistent with performance numbers posted by Nord and Express themselves.
For the graph update I went back 3 years this time instead of just 2, and also filled in a bit more detail of some of the dates that I skipped, courtesy again of the Wayback Machine.
Additionally, 12 more countries had 4 servers added: Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Chad, Comoros, Egypt, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, South Sudan, Sweden, Togo. Rwanda added 3 and Ukraine 2.
Flying against the growth trend was Moldova, that actually lost 6 servers and dropped from 8 to 2. I would guess that since Moldova now has YoutTube ads the servers there have substantially less demand now and so the capacity was no longer required.
So 42 countries got additional Proton VPN servers over the past 3 months and, as promised, here they are (broken into parts since Reddit doesn’t seem to like how long this was originally).
Note that this table is for the net increase. Austria for example got 28 new servers but had 16 retired, so only shows as 12 here. I’ll have the lists of the specific servers added in another thread.
50+ Servers Added
Although the USA has the biggest increase in absolute numbers with 878 servers added, Spain had the biggest relative increase, more than x4ing its size from 21 to 93. Proton’s capacity almost doubled for Canada earlier in the year when they went from 116 servers to 210, and has almost doubled again to 431.
Good read, the other three countries in the United Kingdom is what I’m waiting for, one of the only VPNs I’ve had that seem to only have England servers for the whole United Kingdom.
I’m really enjoying protonvpn and the whole suite as a whole. I have yet to transfer my gmail and Google/iOS calendar to proton but that’s next on my todo list. They also released docs for drive and possibly also the excel like function that Standard Notes has…. Proton is really growing .
For those of you hunting for the freshest servers, I took a drill in to each specific city to see what’s new. I was able to spot 2000 VPN servers that Proton added over the past month. Although this is more than the total increase over 3 months, the difference is due to the large number of old servers that were retired at the same time. tagging you in case you are still keeping an eye on these.
While in a lot of cases, picking the newest server is just a matter of picking the highest number, that is not always the case. I spotted a few cases (such as Miami) where Proton had recycled previously retired server numbers.
In total, 65 cities have had new servers over the past 5 weeks (about half of Proton VPN’s total number of locations). The following are all of the cities that got more than 20 new servers during that time.
Austria - Vienna: AT#61-AT#88 (28)
Australia - Melbourne: AU#145-AU165 (21)
Australia - Brisbane: AU#166-AU186, AU#213-AU#229 (38)
Belgium - Brussels: BE#41-BE#70 (30)
Canada - Vancouver: CA#498-CA#575 (78)
Germany - Frankfurt: DE#242-DE#509 (234)
Denmark - Copenhagen: DK#49-DK#82 (34)
Iceland - Reykjavik: IS#10-IS#33 (24)
Japan - Osaka: JP#200-JP#220 (21)
Japan - Tokyo: JP#221-JP#243 (23)
Netherlands - Amsterdam: NL#350-NL#417 (68)
Spain - Barcelona (new city): ES#88-ES#143 (56)
Spain - Madrid: ES#30-ES#87 (58)
Switzerland - Zurich: CH#242-CH#401 (153)
United Kingdom - London: UK#261-UK#422 (162)
United Kingdom - Manchester: UK#231-UK#247, UK#423-UK#440 (35)
United States - Phoenix AZ: US-AZ#81-US-AZ#166 (86)
United States - Denver CO: US-CO#44-US-CO#108 (65)
United States - Miami FL: US-FL#1-US-FL#25, US-FL#248-US-FL#256 (34)
United States - Atlanta GA: US-GA#211-US-GA#256 (46)
United States - Chicago IL: US-IL#200-US-IL#256 (57)
United States - Secaucus, NJ: US-NJ#25-US-NJ#125 (101)
United States - Dallas TX: US-TX#128-US-TX#216 (89)
United States - Ashburn VA: US-VA#72-US-VA#141 (70)
United States - Washington WA: US-WA#109-US-WA#159 (51)
I wish some of polish servers work for polish streaming services but none of them. Also netshield is really poor blocking , so I would like to get proton soon but nothing beats Windscribe for me.
In the past they have sent out surveys to see what new countries the community wanted added. They probably also check common requests to customer support as well.
