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Although Surfshark has just entered among the best VPNs, it stands out with the features it offers. This VPN offers complete internet freedom, impressive speeds, and solid security.
Founded in 2018, Surfshark is one of the newest players in the VPN industry. Although it has only recently entered the market, it shows really good results in tests carried out in the areas of speed, privacy, and security. Offering AES-256 encryption, OpenVPN, and IKEv2 support, Surfshark also offers a strict no-logs policy and a kill switch to keep your information safe in case your internet connection drops.
In addition, it supports split tunneling, VPN chaining, and URL and ad blocking on most servers. Let’s not forget to mention that they have a total of more than 1,040 servers in 61 countries. As if all that wasn’t enough, Surfshark works great and dodges even the toughest obstacles.
Unlike other VPNs, Surfshark allows an unlimited number of devices to be connected simultaneously with a single subscription. If you are looking for a budget-friendly, fast, reliable, and long-lasting VPN service, Surfshark VPN is definitely a strong candidate.
Surfshark VPN Review
Privacy / Anonymity
Surfshark is also lacking in security. It offers all the basic functionality you would expect from a VPN, such as DNS leak protection, automatic kill switch, secure encryption, and an additional layer of security called MultiHop, their version of Double VPN.
Surfshark also offers many additional features, such as the HackLock feature that alerts you in case of data leaks, and the CleanWeb feature that effectively fights any tracking, phishing, or malicious threats.
If you’re tired of popping up ads everywhere you go online, you’ll be glad to hear that Surfshark has started offering a dedicated search tool that doesn’t keep any browser history. In other words, advertisers cannot use your preferences and browser history to shower you with special advertisements. And yes, Surfshark works in China too, but the manual setup required can be a bit of a hassle. If you want, there is a way! However, we urge you to be cautious about trying to use any VPN service in China.
One of the main concerns when it comes to privacy and VPNs is whether the service provider keeps logs or not. Surfshark collects some information, such as your email address, password, and billing information, but these are only necessary to maintain your account. Session information, IP addresses, bandwidth used, browser history, network traffic, and connection timestamps are not collected.
Also, this VPN provider is headquartered in the privacy-friendly British Virgin Islands, which means it is not in the Five Eyes Alliance’s footprint. One thing to be worried about is that they may collect third-party advertising identifiers for marketing purposes, but you can easily get around this by removing this option from your app settings.
Speed and Reliability
Generally speaking, you should expect your internet speed to drop slightly when you use a VPN service, depending on how strong the encryption method used is. However, this decrease should not be too large. After all, what’s the point of using a VPN if there’s going to be a lot of lag and loading during video conferencing or online gaming? Fortunately, Surfshark performed really well in all of our tests. Before connecting to Surfshark servers, we downloaded at a speed of about 40.70 Mbps. When we connected to the US server, this speed decreased to 25.40 Mbps and to 20.07 on the UK server. Connection speeds are fairly stable and sufficient for video conferencing and even online gaming. We tried connecting to the Japan server in Asia and ended up with an impressive speed of 13.29 Mbps, again. Overall, the results were great and we encountered no connection errors or speed drops during our testing.
Platforms and Devices
As we mentioned before, one of the things that set Surfshark apart from its competitors is that it offers unlimited simultaneous device connections with a single subscription.
It offers secure browser add-ons for Chrome and Firefox and is compatible with major platforms such as macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. If you want to use Surfshark for Playstation, Xbox, Linux, and game consoles, you can read the corresponding manual installation guides.
Customer Service
Surfshark‘s customer service is amazing. They offer a 24/7 live chat option, which you can find on the service’s homepage. You don’t even need to go to the help page! We tried entering a question and didn’t have to wait too long.
In less than a minute, a customer representative answered our question in a polite and professional manner. The representative was very friendly and knowledgeable. Besides the live chat option, Surfshark’s support page includes an information center with educational content, general information, and frequently asked billing questions.