From a security and privacy standpoint, it's almost always better to be behind a VPN rather than exposing your actual IP address to the web. That said, connecting to a VPN will impact your connection in a couple of important ways.The first of these is speed. Since your traffic has to make the additional trip across the VPN's private network on its way to its final destination and back, that adds time and could slow down your overall download and upload rates. For basic online activities like web browsing, the delay will likely be unnoticeable, especially if you're using a good VPN with a nearby regiony. Generally speaking, the farther the VPN region is from your physical location, the slower you can expect your connection to be. Someone in North Carolina, for instance, shouldn't notice much slowdown when using a node in Georgia or Virginia, but should expect slower speeds when connecting to a VPN node in the UK.Also: The 5 best internet speed tests: Test your broadband connectionThe second consideration is latency. While raw speed determines how quickly pages load and streaming media buffers, latency affects how responsive online games are. This factor, measured in milliseconds, doesn't need much of a delay to take an online game from perfect to a laggy mess. A drop of just 50ms can be noticeable. Because of this, it might be best to disable your VPN while playing competitively, or to set up split tunneling to allow your game traffic to use your standard connection while still protecting your other activities by using the VPN's network.