Speed:
For pretty much anything you want to do online, speed is a vital component. If you are using your VPN for gaming and your speeds are insufficient, there goes your game. If you are using your VPN for unblocking geo-restricted streaming sites, poor speeds can mean lots of buffering and bad video quality. Browsing the Internet with slow speeds can mean that you are waiting and waiting for your pages to load, for which no one has patience these days.
For speed, the important categories to look at are upload speed, download speed, and ping.
Your upload speed will indicate how quickly you can send your data to your server. This will determine how swiftly you can email, post to Instagram, and even upload your pics.
The download speed is the speed at which your data can be sent to your server in Mbps. This will directly correlate to your video streaming and loading speed.
Your ping is exactly how it sounds; This onomatopoeia measures how long it takes for your data to “ping” from one point to the next and back. The lower the number, the better.
So, how does CyberGhost measure up when it comes to Internet speed?
Typically, the ability to attain high-speed Internet access is based in part on server size. CyberGhost has over 7,200 servers in over 91 countries around the world, which is a shockingly high number of servers with a broad global reach. In theory, a larger server size means better VPN speeds because when a VPN has too few servers, the small number of servers can get crowded, slowing your online connectivity.
To assess CyberGhost for ourselves, we performed our own speed tests from our CyberGhost Windows app.
Local speeds
We started by downloading CyberGhost’s apps for Windows on our computers. Our starting download speed from New York before connecting to CyberGhost was 143.73 Mbps. Our upload speed was 43.85Mbps, and our ping was 20 ms. When we connected to a local server in a nearby city, our speed dropped to 129.65Mbps download speed; 41.33 Mbps upload speed; and 23 ms ping. These speeds only showed a minor drop when connected to a CyberGhost local server, which is a huge success in our book.
Long-distance speeds
When we connected from NY to servers around the world in Australia and the UK, our speeds were not quite as reliable. Most of the results were still decent, but not as fast as we had expected. Our download speed on the UK server dropped to 39.64 Mbps, with an upload speed of 25.04 Mbps. When we connected to Australia, our download speed dropped to 14.32 Mbps, and our upload speed dropped to 10.09 Mbps
Is it fast enough for gaming
Using a VPN for gaming is important if you want to access geo-restricted countries or access add-ons or downloadable content from other regions.
If you are looking for a reliable VPN for gaming that will ensure that you have good enough speeds to play your games without any annoying delays or lag, CyberGhost is a great option — but mostly on its local servers.
The recipe for great gaming quality is low ping and good download speed. A ping of 100 ms or lower is ideal for gaming, and a speed of 4 Mbps or more for a smooth, lag-free experience. If you have a high ping while you are gaming with competitors, you will likely be very frustrated that you are not performing as well as you had hoped.
If you want to use CyberGhost with your gaming consoles, you can load it on your router, and your gaming consoles will be covered by your VPN if they are connected to your WiFi network. Because you can’t install a VPN directly on most consoles, this is the best way to use your VPN when gaming. This way, you will also be able to connect an unlimited number of devices to your router — all of which will be protected by your VPN.
Unfortunately, when we tested out gaming with CyberGhost, we had higher ping times than we had hoped, which did result in lag. If you are using your VPN primarily for gaming, especially gaming that requires you to connect to a long distance server, we would recommend going to ExpressVPN, which boasts very low ping.
Speed test conclusion
While CyberGhost is a great VPN option when you are connecting to local servers, connecting to long-distance servers does not give you speeds that are quite so great. But, after my speed tests, I found that my speeds — while they did decrease over a distance — were still mostly sufficient for torrenting, gaming, streaming, and browsing.
If you find that you are having too much of a lag when you are gaming or too much buffering when streaming, contact the CyberGhost 24/7 live-chat support, and it will direct you to a server that it recommends for better speeds. If you want a VPN that is guaranteed to have lower ping than CyberGhost so that you are not constantly using the method of trial and error to find a good server with low ping, we would recommend going with ExpressVPN.