We also have the router configured to reboot automatically every night to refresh its connection and keep shuffling the ProtonVPN exit node to which we are connected. After that reboot, the OpenVPN client requests a new server IP address from DNS. If that ping fails, the router reboots itself automatically. Every 300 seconds, DD-WRT pings the ProtonVPN DNS server (only accessible via a ProtonVPN connection). Every time the client connects, Cloudflare DNS serves it a different IP address via round-robin.ĭD-WRT provides a watchdog feature that is handy for addressing when a VPN server goes down. In DD-WRT, I have then configured the OpenVPN client connection to this new custom URL.
So, I collected the IP addresses of all of the premium servers in Atlanta (9 at the time of publishing) and created DNS A records for the same subdomain on a domain I own at my DNS provider (Cloudflare). Since I live in Memphis, the geographically closest city with ProtonVPN servers is Atlanta. So far, it seems they are limiting options to only country-based URLs or server-specific IP addresses. It does not seem like ProtonVPN has plans to provide more granular URLs that target all servers in a specific city or only premium servers (or combinations of the two). Ideally, I would like to filter out the basic/free servers (more heavily loaded) and the servers in cities that are far away from my location (higher latency). That US URL, however, includes all servers in the US. Since I do not want to manually log on to my router often to swap out IP addresses, I would prefer to just connect to something like “ us.” and have ProtonVPN select a quality server for me. Shuffling exit nodes might even boost our privacy as sites we visit see us coming from different IP addresses rather than the same one all of the time.
Servers go offline for maintenance, have traffic spikes, get temporarily blacklisted by popular services, and offer varying levels of latency at any given time.
Unfortunately, I have found that setting a single static server to connect to from our router does not hold up long-term with any VPN provider.
Whichever server or URL we select is sticky because it applies to our entire household and logging on to the router’s admin panel to change it is not frictionless. For example, we can specify the IP address of their server named “US-TX#3” to connect to a specific premium server in Texas, or we can specify “ us.” to connect to any server based in the U.S. We can even see an estimate of the current load on each server so we can select one likely to be more performant.ĭD-WRT‘s OpenVPN client requires either an IP address or a URL to which it will connect. For users who connect to the VPN through applications on their devices, selecting which server to connect to is simple and easy to change through the polished UI. ProtonVPN has hundreds of servers classified by type (Secure Core, Tor, regular), class (basic or premium), and location.
The ProtonVPN configuration download portal