What Is A VPN? A Simple Definition With Pictures, Kings, & Castles

VPN stands for virtual private network. The term may seem daunting, but the concept is simple and important to understand due to the personal privacy issues everyone faces whenever they use the internet.

Rather than putting people to sleep with the topic, I’ve tried my best to make learning about VPNs fun and easy to understand. Through this story that involves kings and castles, I’ll answer the question, “What is a VPN?” and explain how a VPN works.

Once upon a time, there was a castle. (It gets better from here.)

A long time ago (in the 1980s), castles were very expensive. Only the biggest landowners like the Appleulets and the Microsoftiigues could afford them.

Inside the castle, there were lots of valuable resources.

The Appleulets and Microsoftigues stored food, gold, and their customers’ sensitive personally identifiable information inside the castle to keep it safe.

All of this came together to create a network of shared resources inside the company castle.

As the world grew, the castles in different realms wanted to be able to send and receive resources to and from one another, but they had no roads to travel on.

And so they built the internet road — a new way to send resources from one castle to another.

For a long, long time (a year or two), people flowed freely in and out, happily carrying loads of valuable information to other castles.

This stream of people flowing in and out of each castle was called traffic on the internet road.

But then, one day an evil band of hackers started harassing people on the internet road and stealing their food, gold, and personally identifiable information.

The kings of the castles weren’t happy that their resources were being stolen, so they built walls around their castles so that no one could enter or leave their castle without permission.

They called these walls that protected their valuable information firewalls.

Now, even though the King felt safer, he knew that traffic still had to flow in and out of his castle, or his subjects would surely have his head!

So he built drawbridges to allow him to decide what kinds of traffic he wanted to allow to flow in and out of the castle.

These drawbridges were called firewall rules. If the king wanted to allow his subjects to send letters to other castles but not waste their time on Skype, he could do that.

It should be known that after firewalls were created, the valuable resources inside the castle were no longer publicly available, so the network inside the castle was now called a private network.

As the world grew, people who lived outside the castle also wanted to be able to use the internet road to send and receive resources to far away castles and other people in distant lands.

So they all signed up for AOL and bought magical devices called modems that allowed them to connect to the internet road. And the internet road grew quickly.

It should be stated for the record that many of the people who worked inside the castle by day lived outside the castle walls. Their kings, however, wanted more and more resources, so they hired special wizards to devise a magical way for their subjects to work from home.

These loyal servants couldn’t do their jobs without the resources inside the castle, but they couldn’t transport the valuable information over the public internet road or it would surely be stolen by hackers.

So the wizards devised a way to build secret tunnels that gave the king’s most trusted servants access to the resources inside the castle walls that allowed them to connect to the castle’s private network just as if they were already inside.

They called this new way of connecting to the castle’s private network from home a virtual private network.

The act connecting to a castle (or company) through a secret tunnel, or, in other words, the act of connecting to a company’s private network through a tunnel (it’s actually called a tunnel) is called a Virtual Private Network.

Thus, the VPN was created. But our story isn’t over yet.

As the kingdom grew, even little children began to use devices that could connect to the internet road.

And the wizards foresaw a terrible tale: If families couldn’t access the internet road with all of their devices at the same time, life as they knew it would surely fall apart.

And so they created routers, which were magical devices that created a miniature version of the private networks they learned how to create in the castles.

Now, every home had its own private network that connected to the internet road through a router.

Then, other magical wizards came along and created Wizard-Fi, a wireless way for people to connect their devices to their router at home.

Thus was the Wi-Fi router created, and now, every home had its own private Wi-Fi network that connected to the internet through the router.

As more and more people began to use the internet road, the evil hackers started finding more and more ways to steal the people’s resources when they were on the journey from one castle to another.

And so the wizards invented magical encryption to keep people’s information private as it was sent along the road.

Even if the hackers saw the information, they couldn’t tell what it meant because they didn’t have the secret decoding key. But things weren’t as safe as they seemed:

Even if hackers couldn’t read what was inside the message, they could still see where the information was coming from and who the people were sending it to.

As the kingdom continued to expand, the kings of other castles, rulers of the land, and the evil hackers started to pay closer and closer attention to what the people were doing on the internet road.

They followed them home and kept notes on everything they did, so they could hold the signs with products they liked in front of their faces as they traveled.

Sometimes they would even sell that information to other castles. The people didn’t like it very much.

The people began to wonder, “How can I travel the internet road in a way that prevents other people from stealing my resources and knowing who I am?”

They realized they would never be anonymous if hackers could trace them back to their houses, but they still needed to be able to access the internet road from home.

And then, one day, next to the royal water cooler, one of the king’s servants said to another:

“Do you realize that when we connect to the castle’s resources through our VPNs a home, that everything we do on the internet road looks like it’s coming from inside the castle?”

“Yes, my lord. But how does that matter?”

“Don’t you see?” exclaimed the first servant. “We can use the VPN to stay anonymous online, and everything we do on the internet looks like it’s coming to and from the king’s castle — we could get away with anything!”

“Brilliant!” said the second servant, and, filled with overconfidence, the two servants turned into evil hackers and tried to steal innocent people’s resources using the castle’s internet connection.

But the servants weren’t as clever as they thought they were.

The castle’s IT department kept logs of what everyone inside the castle did over the VPN connection, and the two servants were quickly discovered and sentenced to death.

The idea of using VPNs to remain anonymous, however, lived on.

Now, new castles that labeled themselves “VPN service providers” began to spring up all over the place, with the sole purpose of providing an anonymous connection to the internet road for people all over the world.

The kings of these castles often built castles all over the world, so they could make it appear as if each person’s connection to the internet road was coming from almost anywhere in the land.

This made it very difficult for anyone to know who was sending the resources on the internet road.

The people felt safer than ever as they traveled the internet road, because everything they did looked like it was coming in and out of the VPN king’s castle.

But what if the VPN castle they were using was led by an evil ruler who sold their information to other castles? Or what if the VPN’s castle was right located in the same realm as the royal law enforcement agency that could easily subpoena the VPN castle’s records?

Slowly but surely, the people in the kingdom learned that it was important to use common sense and good judgment when choosing a VPN provider. They sometimes learned the hard way that the “free” providers weren’t very trustworthy at all.

And in this medieval world of kings, castles, and VPNs, one wise wizard was heard saying to another, “With VPNs, you get what you pay for.” And that, my friends, is the story of VPNs.

If you think an iPhone VPN could be right for you, read our new article about iPhone VPNs and take a look at our comparison of the best iPhone VPN apps and providers.