VPN advice

[jfrancescon]

Hello,

I am looking into hosting our servers offsite and have been told that we would need to use VPN to acess the servers. My concern is that the speed will not be the same as what we have now. I am not sure if this is correct or not. If so, is there any way to make the speed faster over the VPN

 

[bill001g]

It will in almost all cases be slower, and it has little to do with the VPN.

The key reason remote systems are slower is it takes more time for you data to go from you PC to the server when it is far away than it does when you just go to the next room.

There is little you can do about this...it all eventually comes down to a speed of light thing.

Some application run better than others remotely, A application that does lot and lots of small communication has the most issues. For example will see a significant difference in transfer speed if you were to copy 10000 tiny files from your machine to the server than if you zipped the files into a large one and copied it and then unzipped it on the server with a remote app.

Many times you run remote desktop or citrix type apps to make running some remote application run better. This is the trade off companies make since it is normally cheaper to run off a centralized server farm.

Now if you were to get a poor VPN provider you can make this problem even worse. You can get providers that will guarentee latency if you look around

 

[eibgrad]

In principle, I agree w/ bill001g, although it isn’t so much the speed of light, but that you're being routed all over the internet. It’s no different than expecting the express train to get you across town just as fast as the local. It just ain’t gonna happen. There are too many detours, competing traffic, etc., to overcome. Each hop represents various devices/networks/filters your traffic has to navigate on its way to the final destination. And of course your throughput is never better than the worst hop. And the more hops, the greater opportunity for delays. That’s why some ppl *do* use an express train, such as high-speed dial-up/ISDN/T1 lines. Of course, it’s far more expensive.

 

[benji720]

VPN is a great idea because it will allow you to use RDP to connect to a virtual machine or physical workstation in your office. If you opt to use RDP over VPN and you have a decent internet connection on either side, you should be able to work smoothly. I have an identical set up for my office and my employees love it.

That being said, your organization might not use RDP and just want to use a straight VPN for file copying. If that's the case, you really won't get the same speed you are used to.

This is kind of a complex situation and you might want to talk to a local IT specialist who can come and help you set up a system that will meet your needs. Best of luck on your project!