How to bypass web blocking with Warp, the free VPN from Cloudflare

A quality VPN, efficient even from your mobile, with a reliable company behind it and totally free? This is the Warp service created by Cloudflare, which in its free version is probably the best VPN at no cost, useful for accessing a website by bypassing the operators’ blocking or simply to add a layer of security when using wifi outside the home.

Warp is the secure browsing service created by the people behind the huge CDN content distribution network CloudFlare, the same company that maintains the popular public DNS 1.1.1.1. Although it is not a VPN service, it does share many features similar to those found in paid VPNs on the market. If you are looking for a VPN that doesn’t cost you money, this should be your first choice to avoid leaving your browsing data in the hands of opaque companies that may try to monetise them to pay for the service.

How Cloudflare’s VPN works

Warp uses its own implementation of the efficient VPN protocol. It uses UDP traffic to transport information securely by creating an encrypted tunnel from the user’s device to Cloudflare’s network using its servers as an exit point to the websites you visit. Warp will even allow you to access a website over IPv6 even if you are browsing with IPv4. It’s designed to be very easy to use and it’s also particularly easy on your device’s resources, without draining your battery like other VPN apps.

By keeping the communication between your device and Cloudflare’s servers encrypted, it provides an extra layer of security when using public or non-public wifi. By keeping traffic out of the view of third parties, including encrypting DNS resolution traffic that reveals which website you are visiting, we put the increasingly common filtering systems of IPTV websites and the like out of play.

The operator has no way of finding out where the user is browsing and therefore it is possible to access blocked websites, either by accident as happened recently with Twitch.

However, WARP is not expressly designed to hide the traces of your activity on the net or to allow you to impersonate your geolocation in order to bypass geographical blocks, as it does not allow you to choose the country of the exit node.

How to use Warp

To use the service you need to install the Warp app at https://1.1.1.1 It is available for smartphones and for Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Its interface is extremely simple, with a huge toggle switch to enable or disable its operation. In the desktop version, there is simply an icon in the taskbar to visually check if the service is active and easily access the settings.

The application has two ways of working: Using the 1.1.1.1.1 secure DNS to resolve domain names when browsing, or in addition to that routing traffic through the Warp tunnel. There will be times when we simply want to use DNS resolution outside the DNS assigned to us by the network we are connected to, maintaining the high speed and low latency of a direct connection, and there will be other times when we want to browse under the protection of Warp, even though the speed and latency will be worse, as with all VPN services.

We can even configure it to disable Warp on networks that we consider secure, such as at home, and automatically activate it outside the home, thus avoiding exposing our traffic by accident.

WARP+, paid version with more speed

CloudFlare promises that it does not keep any system logs beyond 24 hours and that the only source of income for the service is the paid version, called Warp+. If you need more speed, Warp+ not only creates a tunnel between your device and CloudFlare’s network, but uses the huge worldwide CDN network, with over 200 locations in 100 countries, to transport your traffic over its backbone network and output it at the closest point to its destination. The price of Warp+ is different for each country, as it is linked to the price of a Big Mac in that location. In Spain it is €3.99 per month.

You can share your referral link to get 1 GB of WARP+ thanks to new users who try the application in this thread: Warp+ referrals thread.