Private Internet Access (PIA) is getting better with the day; the company announced that its Next Generation network of hardened VPN servers is now live in select locations.
Designed from the ground up, the new servers — called Gen4 — deliver better security and performance so that PIA’s VPN network can “meet and exceed the growing demand for quality services.”
The use of Next Generation VPN servers will allow Private Internet Access to work on features such as making the servers verifiably zero-access as part of its “don’t trust, verify” plan. These new servers have been designed with the most recent tried and true technologies to be optimized to provide the most secure and performant VPN service.
PIA’s Next Generation servers use the latest technologies
In a blog post announcing the update, PIA says that its developers have redesigned everything from the hardware components to the deployment and update defaults to provide a better VPN server for the customers. All of these servers are said to use the latest packages in both kernel and userspace, which means that the software will always be up to date against the latest security flaws.
When it comes to deployment, Private Internet Access installs an encrypted operating system instead of letting the data center partner install the OS. On the VPN server itself, all VPN services and other system-critical meta-services are deployed to memory using RAMDisks — meaning that all sensitive information is lost if the server loses power in case it is seized. Besides being confined to memory, all the aforementioned services are also as isolated as possible. Plus, SSH connections to and from servers have Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) protection.
Furthermore, inside each server, PIA is moving from using 1G to 10G network cards — which is the part that should enable faster connection speeds.
Location-wise, the rollout of Gen4 started with the following locations — including US California, US New York City, UK London, UK Manchester, DE Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam.
Mobile users are among the first ones to try Next-Gen VPN servers — all they have to do is toggle the Next Generation preview option in their app settings.
Looking ahead…
The new server infrastructure is just a start, with PIA planning to further streamline the development and deployment of new features.
For start, the company is gearing toward launching new geo-located regions later this month. Some of them are already available in beta, with the official rollout likely coming in the next few days — we’re close to the end of June, after all. In that sense, if you’re a PIA beta user, you can toggle the “Include Geo-Located Regions” option in the Help section in Settings and try out these new locations.
Love to see how good VPN services get even better, don’t you?
Pros
Cons
- Fast, reliable download and upload speeds
- Works great for Netflix and torrenting
- Dedicated Chrome and Firefox extensions
- Connect 10 devices simultaneously
- Doesn't work well in China