In this increasingly internet-connected world where nearly all things from culture to career are driven by the world wide web, virtual private networks (VPNs) have become an indispensable tool to keep individuals and organizations safe when accessing apps and content online.
As a VPN provider, it’s more important than ever for your business to constantly innovate and improve your services to stay ahead of the ever-growing number of cyberthreats – especially now that data has become the “single most valuable commodity” for today’s businesses.
As more and more people adopt the pandemic-driven remote lifestyle, where both work and play require near-constant access to online services and resources from remote locations, demand for reliable, secure, and scalable VPN services will continue to rise. In fact, a third of all internet users today use a VPN to help protect their personal data. That number will only go up as the VPN marketplace is expected to top $107.5 billion by 2027.
With opportunities abounding for VPN providers who can meet this surging demand quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively, this is an ideal time to expand your footprint and acquire more customers.
As you grow your VPN business, however, you might run into the following challenges:
1. Security and privacy concerns – A major, universal pain point for VPN providers is ensuring the security and privacy of user data. Between the growing trends of cyberattacks, hacking attempts, and government surveillance, it can be difficult to ensure that user connections are truly protected from malicious acts and prying eyes.
2. Performance issues – It’s well known that VPNs can negatively impact the speed and stability of the internet connections as the extra step of routing traffic to VPN servers introduces additional latency that can hinder digital experiences. In today’s world where most users expect near-instant app and website responsiveness, anything but a fast and seamless VPN experience is likely to lead to abandonment.
3. Infrastructure maintenance – VPN services rely on a complex infrastructure of servers, networks, and software. It can be challenging to consistently monitor, update, and patch servers to ensure that they’re kept secure and functioning. In addition, the personnel and hardware required to carry out these processes can put a serious strain on your company’s resources.
4. Scaling difficulties – As your business grows to meet rising demand, you’ll need to quickly and efficiently scale up your services to accommodate the influx of new users. With the aforementioned cost and complexity of VPN infrastructures, expanding rapidly while keeping current users satisfied can be challenging.
5. High costs – As a VPN provider, ensuring that your servers have enough bandwidth to handle all of the traffic that flows through them from your users can be extremely costly. The farther users are from your servers, the more likely this cost will balloon due to the additional data centers and other network resources needed to carry their data across long distances – especially in emerging markets with suboptimal infrastructure.
How can Zenlayer help?
Zenlayer has nearly a decade of experience helping companies grow and expand beyond their borders. From small businesses to multinational enterprises, Zenlayer’s advanced suite of compute and networking services have been paving their way to new customers, increased revenue, and improved operational efficiencies.
Let’s see how Zenlayer can help your business overcome the many challenges that come with keeping your users happy while growing your VPN business.
1. Zenlayer provides another layer of privacy and security
Our bare metal and virtual machines (VM) can help you beef up the security of your VPN service. Using Intel’s AES-NI-based hardware which accelerates secure data encryption and decryption, your servers and network connections can be encrypted at rest and in transit to keep user traffic private end-to-end. Additionally, deploying compute at the edge drastically shortens the distance between where user traffic originates and your VPN server, minimizing the chances of interceptions, intrusions, and other malicious acts.
Furthermore, your VPN service likely deals with highly sensitive user data that often include identity and financial information, login credentials, and online activity history. Zenlayer’s private networking solutions can shield that data from unauthorized access and prying eyes by providing a secure and isolated environment for your VPN traffic.
2. Zenlayer bolsters the performance and stability of your service
Our local expertise and partnerships in various regions around the world – both developed and emerging – gives us the unique ability to mesh together a high-performance global network with a blend of the best local carriers. In addition, our 5400+ peers and 290+ edge nodes across 50 countries on six continents ensure that your traffic travels the most direct route, elevating your platform’s speed and responsiveness to give your users a more seamless experience.
Adding Zenlayer’s edge compute solutions into your setup is the cherry on top that further improves the responsiveness and lowers the latency of your services by bringing resources physically closer to where your users are. If needed, we also offer load balancing solutions that can help distribute your peak-hour traffic across multiple nearby VPN servers to ensure maximum service availability.
We also support IPv6 routing that lets you assign each user a unique IP address. When multiple users are assigned a shared address from a limited IPv4 pool and one user commits a malicious act, the entire pool of users under that IP address could be blocked by businesses or even an entire region. You could assign the group a new IP address each time, but this is unsustainable and a quick way to burn through your available IP addresses. Assigning unique IP addresses from the massive IPv6 pool solves this problem and ensures that one user’s actions won’t impact the experience of others on your platform. This translates to a more reliable VPN service and higher user satisfaction overall.
3. Zenlayer shoulders your burden of maintenance
Maintaining business infrastructure can be costly and time-consuming, especially if your VPN service employs many servers spread out across multiple locations.
By leveraging Zenlayer’s edge compute products, you can quickly deploy a highly distributed network that is both easy to monitor and painless to manage. Plus, when your infrastructure is hosted in edge bare metal or VMs on Zenlayer’s massive global network, you won’t need to worry about fixing, updating, or replacing physical hardware. This also helps you free up resources in funds and personnel that would otherwise go into on-site maintenance and repairs.
4. Zenlayer lets you scale quickly and painlessly
Along with maintaining infrastructure, scaling your operations to satisfy a growing user base can be a logistical nightmare. Traditionally, you’d either need to scale up vertically (upgrading and replacing your servers to the latest specs) or out horizontally (adding more servers to your overall infrastructure). Both options are expensive, time-consuming, and further complicate maintenance.
In contrast, zenConsole lets you provision edge compute and networking solutions within minutes, enabling you to instantly allocate resources and add capacity wherever you need it. Rather than shuffling a large amount of capital and waiting months to build out additional infrastructure, zenConsole can help you get it done in a fraction of the costs and time.
5. Zenlayer helps improve operating cost-efficiency
Bandwidth is expensive, but our flexible pricing models can help you trim the fat and use your budget as effectively as possible.
Although you have the option to pay a flat fee for bandwidth, we also offer monthly aggregate bandwidth and data transfer pricing. If you go with aggregate bandwidth, we group together your servers and bill you for all their combined bandwidth caps. If you prefer data transfer, we bill you for the total amount of bandwidth used across all your servers.
Aggregate bandwidth pricing helps you balance between underutilized and overutilized servers to eliminate bandwidth waste and make the most of your bandwidth spend. Data transfer, on the other hand, lets you pay for what you use.
In addition, our 95% burstable billing model for aggregate bandwidth gives you the flexibility to not overcommit to more expensive bandwidth caps. By sampling your bandwidth usage over the month and trimming the top 5%, or peak bandwidth use, you can rest easy knowing that momentary, unexpected traffic spikes that burst through your bandwidth cap are less likely to incur overage fees.
Scale your VPN service with Zenlayer
Growing any business can be both exhilarating and a little scary. Although some challenges that come with expansion simply can’t be avoided, Zenlayer’s expertise, advanced compute and networking solutions, and 24/7 live support team can take most of the pain out of growing your VPN service.
You can count on our global network of 290+ points of presence (PoPs) and 5400+ peers to help you bring your apps and services close to your users for silky smooth digital experiences, no matter where they are.
If you want to grow your VPN service quickly, efficiently, and cost-efficiently while ensuring maximum satisfaction for your existing users, chat with one of our solution experts today!
