What is a VPN

A virtual private network — VPN — is an encrypted tunnel between your device and a remote server. Anything you send to the internet goes through that tunnel first. The tunnel is encrypted, so the network between you and the server can't read it. The server then forwards your traffic to its real destination using its own IP address.

Two things change for a website you visit:

• It sees the VPN server's IP, not yours.
• Your ISP, the café Wi-Fi, or whoever else sits between you and the VPN server sees only encrypted noise going to one IP. They don't see what sites you visit, which DNS lookups you make, or what data you send.

That's the whole mechanism. Every other VPN feature is built on top of it.

What a VPN actually changes

Without a VPN, your ISP can see every domain you visit through DNS lookups and TLS SNI. With one, those go through the tunnel and resolve via the VPN's DNS instead. The destination website still sees a connection — but it sees the VPN's IP, not yours.

For public Wi-Fi, the VPN moves the trust boundary. You're no longer trusting "whoever runs this airport's network." You're trusting the VPN provider, who you chose deliberately and pay to act in your interest.

For censorship, a VPN routes around local blocks. If your country blocks a site, the block applies to your ISP — not to a server in another country that the VPN connects to.

What a VPN does not do

A VPN is not anonymity. The website you visit knows you're on a VPN (the IP belongs to a known datacentre), and any login you submit identifies you. A VPN does not hide what you do — it hides where you do it from.

A VPN doesn't protect against malware on your device, phishing emails, or data you voluntarily hand over to a service. The encryption stops at your device's edge; if something on your laptop is compromised, the VPN can't help.

A VPN with bad logging is worse than no VPN. If the provider logs every site you visit and hands logs to authorities, the trust boundary moved from "ISP" to "logging VPN provider" — same problem, different company.

What makes one VPN better than another

Three things, roughly in order:

1. What it logs. Read the policy. "No logs" is a marketing claim; the question is what they actually keep, and where they're legally allowed to keep less.
2. Whether the kill switch is real. Userland kill switches have a 200 ms leak window. Kernel-level ones don't.
3. What protocols it supports. WireGuard for speed; VLESS Reality for restricted networks; OpenVPN for compatibility.

Fexyn ships all three with no browsing-history, DNS-query, or traffic-content logs, and a kernel-level kill switch on Windows.

Try Fexyn free for 7 days — see whether the tunnel does what it should on your specific network before you pay for anything.