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When I connect my VPN to certain servers in Europe and go to ping.pe I get an address that is in the UK, even if I am connected elsewhere. I believe this might be the address of the company that hosts the servers but strangely enough with other servers (that appear to be from the same provider) I get an address in the same place as where the server I am connecting to is.

Example:

UK address: https://i.sstatic.net/hhYFC.png

Switzerland Address: https://i.sstatic.net/IFkAq.png

Both appear to be hosted by M247 Ltd (which is based in Manchester UK I believe), one even says Zurich infrastructure and the other says Zurich dedicated servers if that makes any difference?

Can anyone:

1) Explain what is going on?

and

2) Tell me if this is of any concern in terms of privacy/security/anonymity of my VPN?

Thank you!!!!

1 Answer 1

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You are looking at the wrong address. There, at the very top of the "UK address" picture, you see that it is in fact an address in Switzerland. The IP address is what is traceable about your connection, and the address in that picture (185.236.201.147) is listed in Zurich.

In fact, you can also look at the GEOLOC value and see coordinates in Switzerland, as well as a COUNTRY value of CH. So the IP address you are looking at is registered in Switzerland.

Below the information on the IP address, you are seeing information about the registered assignee who controls that IP address (the IP's owner). The owner happens to have a business mailing address in the UK, which is what you're seeing in the second section there. Let me be very clear, the second data set on that page is not information about the IP address, it is information about the registered owner of the IP; therefore it is not required to have any details at all matching the IP's actual/physical location (In your 2nd picture, the registered owner of the IP address is the Zurich office for GlobalAXS, hence the CH mailing address.)

So, the TLDR answer here is that you really are using a VPN hosted in CH, and you're just looking at the wrong info on that web site.

The more fun answer is that the information you see listed for the IP doesn't even necessarily have to be accurate. Last week I had an IP address listed as from Ecuador on a cloud-hosted machine that is sitting in a Microsoft data center in West Virginia, USA. I've heard of other people with machines in the same data center that had IP addresses that were originally assigned to India. While these IP assignment databases are supposed to be properly updated, a large enough company that has IP addresses in several different regions and private interconnects between those regions could actually cross-publish routes and get stuff really screwy. Microsoft was apparently running out of USA based IP addresses so they funneled some of the Ecuadorian and Indian addresses into the East USA zone; whatever, the routes all still work in both directions (it still goes into a MS Azure center). But that just goes to prove that geo-IP lookups can be very inaccurate.

And with a VPN the service you're paying for is to protect you and your identity. Both of these (even if it had been in the UK) do that. In both pictures the IP addresses shown are not yours and instead map back to a GlobalAXS Network Operations Centre. That means the VPN is working an you're secure; anyone looking will see that the client they are talking to is GlobalAXS and not IkiH.

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  • @Iki-H The most common reason for two different daughter companies of a main holding/operating company will each order/register/buy IP addresses is so that the main company can get more of them. There are limited numbers of IPv4 addresses, and the available pool of those is now virtually depleted. Before they ran out, the agencies that assign them were rationing. If you needed a lot of addresses you could try writing really good reasons and apply, but it was often easier to have multiple companies apply and see how many were accepted & you were awarded.
    – Ruscal
    Commented Feb 1, 2019 at 14:58

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