The Direct Mirror Advantage
When you connect directly to an official 96.com mirror, your packets take the cleanest possible path from your local ISP through Tier 1 backbones directly to our Anycast edge nodes.
By contrast, using a commercial VPN adds an intermediary hop: 1. Your device encrypts traffic 2. Traffic travels to the commercial VPN server 3. The VPN server decrypts traffic and connects to 96.com 4. The response travels all the way back through the same tunnel
This inevitably introduces 30–90 ms of additional latency. In 95% of everyday gaming and account management sessions, connecting directly to a verified low-latency mirror delivers significantly superior performance.