VPN vs proxy for torrenting – Which one should you use?

Protecting your privacy and security is essential when torrenting. Learn why a VPN outperforms a proxy – protecting you against hackers and preventing ISPs from tracking your activities.

Privacy and security are critical factors to consider when torrenting. Although proxies offer a quick fix to bypass country-specific torrent blocks, they fail to safeguard your activities against ISP tracking and hackers.

In this guide, we closely examine the key differences between a proxy and a VPN. We will explain why relying solely on a proxy falls short and how a VPN serves as a dual-purpose tool – providing freedom of access and robust protection.

Switching to a torrenting VPN is an essential step towards a safer torrenting experience. Keep reading to find out why.

What are the risks when torrenting?

Most people are aware that torrenting creates privacy risks. ISPs monitor users and often maintain logs of their users’ activities. This isn't just a hypothetical risk – in many countries, ISPs are required to share these logs with government authorities. Even in places like the US, your browsing history, including your torrent activities, could be sold to or shared with third parties.

Imagine that every file you download and every torrent you join is being tracked and recorded. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is happening unless you protect yourself with a VPN. It's not just about your ISP knowing what you're doing, either. Your ISP could share your information with third parties such as law enforcement or copyright attorneys.

Torrent swarms: a hacker’s paradise

Besides the privacy considerations mentioned above, torrenting exposes you to other crucial threats. When you torrent, you connect directly with other users, creating a peer-to-peer link that hackers can exploit. Most of the peers in torrent swarms are friendly users there to share files, but it only takes one malicious user to put you at risk.

You could unwittingly connect to a peer that's a government snoop, copyright troll, or a hacker. Cybercriminals hang out in torrent swarms to harvest unprotected IP addresses, which they then probe for vulnerabilities to exploit. This could lead to dangerous malware infections, data theft, or even having your device added to a criminal botnet.

Every time you torrent, you face these dangers head-on, and protecting yourself is a lot easier than you might think.

What is a proxy for torrenting?

A proxy is a server that acts as a middleman between you and the websites, services, or torrent swarms you connect to. When you connect to a proxy, you appear to be in a remote location; one where torrent websites haven’t been blocked by ISPs on behalf of the government. 

You can regain access to torrent repos to search for files and download the pieces using a torrent client like qBittorrent, uTorrent, Vuze, or Deluge.

A VPN can be a type of proxy, but not all proxies are VPNs.

How does a proxy help when torrenting?

When you use a proxy for torrenting, your internet traffic is routed through the intermediary server location. Proxies may be run by organizations or individuals.

When you connect, you assume the IP address of the proxy server, and your real IP address is hidden. Changing your IP address allows you to bypass geo-restrictions and ISP blocks on torrent sites. A different IP address helps prevent cyber criminals from probing your network for vulnerabilities and conceals your real IP address from government snoops and copyright trolls.

The privacy limitations of proxies

Although a proxy can help to prevent your IP address from being visible to other users, cybercriminals, and copyright trolls, it is important to understand their limitations, especially when compared to a secure VPN tunnel.

Not all proxies are created equally, and when you use a proxy you may not be able to grade the level of protection that proxy is giving you. Transparent proxies, for example, do not fully conceal your IP address, leaving it exposed while torrenting.

Proxies are also susceptible to DNS and WebRTC leaks. WebRTC is a technology that allows direct communication between web browsers. Although it is a useful technology, it can reveal your real IP address, even if you're using a proxy. Think of it as a hidden side door that can leak your IP address and you get an idea of why using a proxy can give you a false sense of privacy.

What’s more, it is not always possible to identify who is hosting a public proxy. You could accidentally connect to a proxy controlled by a hacker, a government organization, or another questionable entity. Using proxies is risky because you don’t know who you’re trusting with your data.

Proxies don't have encryption

Besides being unreliable for concealing your IP address, most proxies also lack encryption, especially free ones. Even if a proxy successfully conceals your IP address – it might do nothing to prevent local networks, ISPs, government agencies, or other unwanted third parties from being able to track your torrent activities. This is a crucial limitation of a proxy when compared to a VPN.

Types of proxies

There are various types of proxies. HTTP proxies are typically used for web browsing. SOCKS proxies are more versatile and can handle torrent traffic. While SOCKS proxies offer more flexibility for torrenting, they lack the security you get with a VPN. 

Some leading VPNs throw in a SOCKS5 proxy with their VPN, and you can often stack this proxy on top of the VPN for added privacy. This can provide you with the benefit of a SOCKS proxy in countries where VPN use is frowned upon or where VPN connections are blocked, for example.

We have included a list of different types of proxies below:

• HTTP proxy: Specifically designed for web browsing, HTTP proxies are used to process HTTP and HTTPS web traffic. They are commonly used for web browsing and accessing geo-restricted content.
• SOCKS proxy: SOCKS proxies can handle any type of traffic, including that from P2P networks, making them suitable for torrenting.
• Transparent proxy: These proxies do not hide your IP address from the servers you connect to. 
• Anonymous proxy: Designed to hide your IP address, anonymous proxies offer a greater level of privacy than transparent proxies. 
• Distorting proxy: This type of proxy identifies itself as a proxy to the site it connects to but gives a false IP address, making it appear as though the traffic is coming from a different location.
• Residential proxy: These proxies route your internet traffic through an IP address associated with a physical location, making them appear more legitimate than data center proxies.
• Datacenter proxy: Unlike residential proxies, datacenter proxies come from a server farm, making it clear that you are not a residential internet user.
• Reverse proxy: Used mainly for load balancing and server protection, reverse proxies intercept requests to a server to manage the traffic more efficiently.

What is a VPN for torrenting?

A VPN is an online privacy tool that vastly increases your protection when torrenting. It works by encrypting all the data traveling from your computer (or mobile device) and tunneling it securely to a remote server location. The way a VPN works makes it much more trustworthy and secure for torrenting than a proxy. 

Below, we have included an overview of the advantages provided by a VPN:

• Get an IP address in a large number of countries to access a wide variety of torrents.
• Prevent local networks, ISPs, and government agencies from monitoring your traffic or DNS requests.
• Stop your IP address being detected by copyright trolls and hackers.

Security advantages of using a VPN for torrenting

In this section, we have detailed exactly how a VPN differs from a proxy. The privacy and security features listed below make VPNs an unparalleled choice for gaining watertight privacy and security while torrenting. 

1. Encryption: When you connect to a secure VPN for torrenting that includes the OpenVPN protocol or WireGuard protocol, you will encrypt your data with robust AES-256 encryption or 256-bit ChaCha20 encryption. These are secure protocols that ensure nobody can gain access to the contents of your traffic.
2. Shared IP addresses: Most commercial VPNs use shared, dynamic IP addresses. That means every user connected to the same server is assigned the same IP address, making it much more difficult to trace online activity back to a single user. Because they’re dynamic as well, IP addresses change regularly. 
3. IP, DNS, and WebRTC leak protection: The best VPNs provide native leak protection that ensures no traffic ever escapes the encrypted tunnel. This means that your ISP, government snoops, and other eavesdroppers cannot detect your online activities.
4. No logging policy: The VPNs we recommend for torrenting all include a no-logging policy that promises never to keep records of your source IP address, the IP address of the servers you use, or any of the data that passes through the VPN (activity logs). This ensures that the VPN never retains records of its user's activities or identity. This is a big difference from proxies where it is often hard to know who is running the VPN and what they are doing with the data that passes through.
5. Diskless servers: To provide additional security for their users, the top three VPNs on our lists run on diskless servers. By running the server in RAM instead of a hard disk, no user data is ever stored, even if a server is raided mid-session.
6. A kill switch: The best VPNs have a system-level kill switch that blocks any data leaving your devices outside of the VPN tunnel. This feature completely cuts your internet if the VPN connection fails. This ensures that none of your torrenting data ever travels outside of the VPN tunnel.
7. Fully audited: To provide additional assurances and transparency for their users, the very best VPNs undergo independent security audits. These audits are carried out by independent security companies to search for vulnerabilities, improve any potential flaws in their apps or networks, and prove to their users that everything about their VPN is providing privacy and data security to the standards advertised. 

What are the technical differences between a proxy and a VPN?

A VPN will conceal all of your torrenting activities from local WiFi networks, ISPs, and government agencies to gain reliable privacy. It will protect you against leaks, ensuring that the VPN connection always hides your activities and your IP address.

To make things as clear as possible, we compared proxies and VPNs side by side below:

Can I combine a proxy and a VPN?

Yes. While a proxy alone doesn't provide comprehensive privacy or security for torrenting, using it in conjunction with a VPN offers some advantages, particularly in regions with stringent internet censorship. However, it's crucial to use a proxy that's provided by a reputable VPN service rather than a random proxy sourced online.

In countries where VPN usage is frowned upon, heavily monitored, or even blocked by ISPs under government directives, combining a VPN with a proxy can be beneficial. Countries like the UAE, China, and Egypt, among others, are known for their strict control over internet access, often blocking VoIP apps and various websites for cultural or political reasons.

The best VPNs for torrenting are aware of these restrictions. They offer additional obfuscation features to disguise VPN traffic and make it less detectable. 

These providers often also include HTTP and specialized SOCKS proxies (such as Shadowsocks or SOCKS5) in their services. These types of proxies are particularly effective in tandem with VPNs because they provide an extra layer of obfuscation, enhancing your ability to bypass blocks and evade deep packet inspection used by some governments and ISPs.

How do VPNs and proxies impact torrenting speeds?

There are two important factors to consider when comparing how proxies and VPNs affect download speeds.

Encryption

The encryption provided by a VPN slightly reduces the speed of your internet. All data transferred between your device and the VPN server has to be encrypted and decrypted, which adds overhead. To counteract this issue, the best VPNs have super-fast servers and protocols designed to minimize speed reduction. 

VPNs like NordVPN and Surfshark have average global download speeds of over 200 Mbps. This exceeds the speed of most home broadband. The WireGuard protocol is specifically designed to provide better speeds. The drop in speed for most users is imperceptible.

A proxy does not provide any additional data encryption for your torrenting activities, this is a drawback in terms of security but can work as an advantage for giving you better speeds. 

Server reliability

Both VPNs and proxies route your connection through an intermediary server, which adds latency to your connection. The capacity of the server can impact speeds as well if there are many users connected. 

Although a proxy can theoretically offer higher peak speeds due to the lack of encryption, VPNs often provide more consistent and reliable speeds over time. This consistency is crucial for lengthy torrent downloads.

Market-leading VPNs employ fast, high-capacity servers. These servers are set up exclusively to tunnel data for VPN users and often use automatic load balancing to prevent congestion.

Reliability and uptime comparisons

A well-known VPN provider such as NordVPN or Surfshark is not only much more secure and trustworthy than a proxy, it is also much more reliable. The VPNs we recommend for torrenting provide thousands of servers around the globe. Each of these servers provides you with access to multiple IP addresses in each location. This ensures that you do not need to worry about server load or congestion. You will always be able to connect to a remote IP address to torrent when you want to. 

Proxy servers are much more limited when compared to the extensive networks offered by reputable VPN providers. You might find that certain proxies only offer a handful of locations, limiting your options for bypassing geo-restrictions or finding a fast connection.

To make matters worse, proxy servers can suddenly become unavailable or get blocked, especially if they're primarily used for accessing restricted content. The unpredictable nature of proxies is a significant drawback compared to a VPN.

Conclusion

Although a Proxy can provide you with access to restricted torrents it will not protect your privacy or offer sufficient security against hackers. VPNs are designed from the ground up to protect your data, conceal your activities, and give you the best possible reliability. 

VPNs have:

• Better security
• More reliable connections
• Better privacy protection features

That said, not all VPNs were created equally. There are many insecure VPNs available online. These VPNs fail to adequately protect user data. 

Studies have revealed that free VPNs often lack encryption or suffer from leaks, for example. Using these free VPNs is just as unreliable as using a proxy, so please be careful when choosing a VPN and stick to reputable no-log services with strong encryption.

Even some paid VPNs have sluggish servers that aren’t suitable for torrenting, gaming, or streaming in HD. Shop around for a reliable VPN for torrenting that is known to be fast.

Our recommendations have been thoroughly audited using a precise VPN testing methodology. This ensures that each VPN we recommend is safe, reliable, and fast enough for you to enjoy torrenting on your machine.