What Sites Disallow VPNs and Why?

Is something wrong with your Web browsing with VPN turned on? Some sites appear to have trouble passing through VPN, but load just fine after disabling it? Keep calm, this is just an effect of the ongoing arms race. We’ll explain what that issue is and how to overcome it.

VPNs were first invented to remotely connect to certain networks with restricted access. Nowadays, one of the most common reasons to use a VPN is to avoid geo-blocking. For better or worse, the copyright is a territorial law. As a consequence, creative works can be sold for legal distribution only in certain regions of the world, usually specific countries. That wasn’t an issue before the age of the Internet, but nowadays online entities must somehow obey these laws. The websites themselves could be viewed anywhere in the world, but much of their content must be restricted, based on the location of the visitor. Luckily for the websites, the IP addressing is directly tied to a geographical location of the user. So, a simple request made from your IP during the initialization of the connection with any remote server can reveal your approximate location.

The VPNs are able to circumvent this, because the remote connection via a VPN server alters the IP from the real one to that of the server. The VPN service acts as an intermediary between you and the rest of the Internet. This misleads geographical IP queries, but the entire process of geoblocking can go further since online services know about VPNs and try to obey the laws to the best of their abilities.

How can a VPN be blocked by a website?

Online entities with a lot of geo-blocked content, like Netflix, are run by professionals. They have long realized that people change their IPs to avoid territorial IP blocking. With a little effort the fake IPs could be linked to data centers that host servers of numerous VPN companies. Because such IPs are public, they can be stored in databases. Afterwards, a website checks users’ IPs twice before allowing them in. First is for the physical location, second is to check if the IP comes from a suspicious source, for example a server known to host a VPN service. This can be viewed as a countermeasure for netizens’ trying to circumvent geoblocking. Starts looking like an arms race, right? Fortunately, if you ever run into such a situation, know that you’re not defenseless.

What can you do about it

Putting an IP address on a blacklist of blocked addresses makes sense as long as it remains suspicious. A way to prevent this is to never remain under one address. A dynamic IP keeps changing, either every time you connect or periodically (or both), so there’s a smaller chance of getting blacklisted. So the way to circumvent IP blocking is to change the IP to the one that is not blacklisted, but you can’t do it on your own since it’s your VPN supplier who handles this. To learn how to go about this problem, check out VPN provider’s websites and technical blogs. One of the methods is to use a residential VPN. It doesn’t rely on data centers and introduces dynamic IPs. Connection speeds are less reliable, but this solution is virtually immune to IP blocking. Tuxler VPN and many other VPN providers offer residential VPN as an option – just pick one and your IP blocking problem will be solved.