How it works

Last updated: 14 September 2026

Most VPN marketing pages ask you to trust a bullet-point list. This page is the detail behind ours — what the apps actually do, what leaves your device, and what we don't collect.

The tunnel

Your traffic is carried over a standard, encrypted WebSocket connection to our servers — not a proprietary protocol. Every native app (macOS, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux) uses the same underlying client code, so the behaviour is identical across platforms; there's no "the Android app leaks less" situation.

By default, all IPv4 and IPv6 traffic from your device — including DNS lookups — is routed through the tunnel. We don't split-tunnel by default, because a split tunnel is the most common way a "VPN" quietly leaks your real IP for some of your traffic.

Built for unreliable networks

A lot of VPN protocols fall apart on lossy or high-latency connections — hotel wifi, mobile networks, or paths that throttle unrecognised traffic — because they tunnel TCP inside TCP, and the two loss-recovery mechanisms fight each other. Our default transport avoids that: web traffic is terminated locally and relayed over a multiplexed connection instead of re-wrapping TCP inside TCP, so a single dropped packet doesn't stall your whole connection. You shouldn't have to think about whether your network is "VPN-friendly."

What's not in the app

The app's only network calls are to our own servers, to establish and maintain your VPN connection.

What "no logs" means here

Connection timestamps and your originating IP are held in server memory only for the duration of an active session, to route your traffic — they're never written to disk. We don't inspect, log, or store the content of your traffic. The full detail of what's collected and why is in our Privacy Policy.

Verifying this yourself

Because the transport is standard TLS rather than a proprietary protocol, the traffic your device sends is inspectable with ordinary network tooling — you don't have to take our word for what leaves the device. If you run into behaviour that doesn't match what's described here, we want to hear about it: hello@2sh.uk.