Internet routing is imperfect by nature, as there are many factors that can dictate speeds, at various times of the day. Here are some things you can do to improve speeds:
1a. Connect to the closest location
To get the best performance, you should connect to the closest location to you, geographically. Keep in mind that you can expand each location to reveal a list of cities by clicking the arrow to the right of the location name in the drop down menu.
1b. Connect to different locations
Try to connect to several other Windscribe servers as well. Sometimes the routing to the server you are trying to use or some other particular issue might be causing problems with you connection. This is why we have hundreds of servers all over the world, so that you can try and get connected even when some servers are not working properly for you.
2. Try a different port or protocol
Go to Preferences > Connection and change the Connection Mode to Manual. Then change the Port and Protocol combinations to see if any of them will work better for you. Some ports may work better than others on highly restrictive networks. Make sure you try to reconnect each time you change these settings.
The standard protocols to use are IKEv2, WireGuard and UDP/TCP. If none of these work, the protocols might be blocked so try to use the secondary protocols that help you get around VPN blocks. These are Stealth and WStunnel.
3. Disable anti-virus/firewall
A lot of modern anti-virus/firewall software does a lot more than just protect you from malware. Products like Avast, Avira, Malwarebytes and others others inspect your network traffic in order to do their job. This can sometimes cause the connection to our servers to be slowed down or interrupted entirely, which will result in slow speeds and frequent disconnects. You should try quitting out of this type of software entirely, as even pausing protection will sometimes have no effect.
4. Enable VPN pass-through
If you have access to the router on your network, look for "IPSec/IKEv2/VPN pass-through" option on the router configuration page. Make sure it's enabled.
If you are still having issues with the connection, please contact our support team and let us know the details of your issue. We will do our best to help you out: https://windscribe.com/support/ticket
