VPN is known to be able to bypass various government restrictions, including bypassing blocked or censored websites and accessing the Geo-restricted or region-locked content. In fact, most VPN users use the private connection in order to be able to access certain online services that are only available in certain countries. For instance, for people who can’t use Netflix in their country, they might want to use VPN to access the US Netflix service and stream the movies and TV shows that they want to watch without having to move into the US.
Geo-restriction is very common in the globalized world of today. Because many companies or studios only want to distribute their movies to specific regions, this region locking is usually applied for their entertainment products. This includes movies, video games, TV shows, and even certain hardware. Here are 5 things that you need to know about Geo-restriction and region locking:
1. Region-locked Services See Your IP Address To Determine Your Location
Most online services that apply region-locking in their website or app will see the traffic coming to their platform and analyze the IP address of their users. In determining the user’s location, they will see your IP address and decide whether they will let you to access the service or not. For instance, if your IP address comes from Germany and you are trying to access the region-locked content from the US, you can’t do that because the content is only available for the US citizens. However, that’s not the case since they won’t verify your citizenship and instead only see the IP address of the country that you are using. This is why VPN can be used to bypass the Geo-restriction easily.
2. Some VPN Services Can’t Bypass Certain Geo-restricted Content
While it is true that the VPN in general can be used to bypass region-locked content on the internet, it is not always the case. Certain VPN services cannot bypass certain Geo-restricted content due to various reasons. The most common reason is that the Geo-restricted service has banned the use of VPN completely so that any traffic that comes from a private connection will automatically be blocked. However, this banning can be lifted if you use a good VPN service that can’t be detected as a private connection service. In this way, you can still access the region-locked content when you use the right VPN service.
3. Geo-restricted Websites Might Ban Your Private IP Address
Don’t be surprised when you try to access the Geo-restricted websites using VPN and you found out that your IP address can’t be used to access the site. This means that the private IP address has been banned by the website or by the service provider, making it impossible for you to go further. The only way to get around this problem is to change your private IP address by changing your server location and try to connect again. Or, the worst case scenario would be to change your VPN service and use a different service provider that doesn’t use banned IP addresses for their private connection.
4. Using A Dedicated Private IP Address Is Best To Access Region-Locked Content
In the case where you can’t access the region-locked websites using the regular private IP address, it is important for you to try using a dedicated private IP address instead. This will solve most of the problems related to the VPN and IP address ban because a dedicated IP address will give you a clean IP address to be used in your private connection, which hasn’t been banned by any service before. However, it will require you to add some expenses to rent the dedicated IP address, whether monthly or yearly, in addition to the current VPN subscription fees.
5. Your Private IP Needs To Match The Destination Country
Even though VPN connection can be used to access various websites that are locked to a certain region, it doesn’t mean that you can use any server location in order to do that. You need to match your private IP with the destination country in order to make it possible for you to access the region-restricted content. In other words, if you want to access US Netflix, you need to choose the US server in your VPN. If you want to access the online services in the UK, you need to choose the UK server in order to do that.
Those are the things that you need to know about Geo-restriction and region locking. By understanding about these terms, you can use your VPN to bypass the restriction and avoid any problems such as VPN ban, IP address ban, and so on.