How does OVPN keep track of simultaneous devices?

You can use OVPN to connect on multiple devices simultaneously. In order to keep track of the number of connections you have, OVPN uses a device counter. This device counter does not use any identifiable information such as device ID, IP address or timestamps, as that would be against our no-log policy. Instead, our device counter only stores a number between 0 and 4+n, where n is the number of years you've been subscribed. For more information about how many devices you can have, please take a look at Number of allowed connections.

Whenever you connect to one of our servers, the VPN server authenticates you with your OVPN username and password. When an authentication is successful and you connect to the server, that also sends a signal to increase your device counter by one. If your device counter is already at max, your connection will be rejected until such a time that one of your devices have disconnected.

When you disconnect from our servers, the server sends a "goodbye" message, which tells our web server to reduce your device counter by 1.

Since the device counter has no information of which device or devices you are connected with, or even which servers, that makes it hard to make a proper device counter, which unfortunately makes it prone to mistakes. For example, if you were to unexpectedly disconnect from our servers, a "goodbye" message might not be sent, and in that case the device counter will not be reduced by one. When that happens, the device counter may erroneously believe you have more connected devices than you actually do. This can happen due to several reasons, but some of the more common are:

If you believe that your device counter is displaying the wrong number of connected devices, please contact our support, and they can reset your device counter.