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One of our main concerns when reviewing a VPN is what value it offers. Do you get a lot for what you pay for or do you get less than the competition? Surfshark has tons of additional privacy features and takes the unusual step of not putting any limits on the number of devices a single account can use. This makes it great value for money - even if the price is a bit high. The company also deserves credit for the efforts it is making to improve transparency.

What is a VPN?

When you turn on a VPN, an encrypted tunnel is created between your computer and a server operated by the VPN company. If you put all web traffic through this tunnel, your traffic will appear as if it came from the VPN server and not from your computer. This will hide your IP address. This makes it much more difficult for spies, advertisers, and your ISP to keep track of your activity online. The latter is important as ISPs can now sell your anonymized data for a profit.

VPNs, while powerful tools, cannot solve all of your privacy and security problems. The Tor network provides better anonymity and you need to worry about other threats. So use antivirus, two-factor authentication, and a password manager.

Prices and features

Surfshark currently costs $ 11.95 per month, $ 71.88 per year, or $ 47.76 every two years. That's a heavy discount, but not all that uncommon in the VPN market. I recommend starting with the shortest possible subscription possible to make sure it works for you and then increasing to longer subscription terms if you choose to use the service.

If that's too rich for your blood, there are plenty of cheap VPNs and even a few worthy free VPNs to consider. ProtonVPN fits into both categories and is particularly noteworthy as it's one of the few free VPNs that doesn't have a data limit.

Surfshark allows P2P and BitTorrent over VPN on certain servers, and the CleanWeb tool also offers ad blockers. However, its real strengths are the rarely seen features it offers. One such feature is Whitelister, a split tunneling tool that routes app traffic or websites outside of the VPN tunnel. Whitelisting websites is smart as some websites block access through VPNs. This can be anything from video streaming sites to banks. Surfshark's solution is very neat and goes above and beyond most of the competition.

The other unusual feature is Multihop, that Establishes a VPN connection to one server and then forwards your traffic to a second VPN server for even more security. Few competitors offer this feature, which trades enhanced privacy for speed. Both Multihop and Whitelister are powerful tools, and while you may not (or never) use them every day, they justify the high price of Surfshark. More about these features below.

A rare feature that Surfshark doesn't currently offer is access to Tor over VPN, which is available through NordVPN and ProtonVPN. In particular, ProtonVPN also offers multihop and split tunneling.

Many VPN companies offer add-ons to your basic subscription. For example, TorGuard offers an à la carte option for the number of simultaneous connections desired. NordVPN and others offer private static IP addresses that come in handy whenever your VPN connection is blocked. Surfshark has static IP addresses in its subscription, but you need to share them with other users on the same server.

VPN protocols

There are many different ways to establish a VPN connection. My preferred option is OpenVPN, which is known for its speed and reliability. More importantly, it is an open source option, meaning that the code can be examined for potential vulnerabilities. Surfshark offers OpenVPN in its Android, iOS, Linux and Windows apps. The excellent IKEv2 protocol is also available on all platforms and is standard for MacOS.

Server and server locations

Geographical distribution is important because by choosing many locations around the world, you can be more likely to find one near where you live or when you are traveling, and have plenty of options for faking your location. Surfshark covers 64 countries with its servers, which is above average. ExpressVPN leads the way with a whopping 94 countries, and CyberGhost is close behind with 90 countries.

Surfshark provides above average coverage for South America and Africa, with both regions being often ignored by other companies. Surfshark also offers servers in countries with repressive internet policies, including China, Russia, Turkey and Vietnam. Competitors would do well to follow Surfshark's lead.

Some VPNs use what are known as virtual servers. These are software-defined servers. This means that numerous virtual servers can be hosted on a single hardware server. With this technology, companies can quickly add servers to meet requirements or configure a server to appear in a country where the company cannot guarantee the security of its hardware, while it is actually hosted in a more secure location . In general, I have no problem with virtual servers, but I believe companies need to be transparent about which servers are virtual and indicate the actual location of the server. Surfshark uniquely identifies its four virtual locations (Albania, Chile, Costa Rica and Slovenia), all of which are hosted on machines in the Netherlands.

Your privacy with Surfshark

Using a VPN requires a high level of trust because when you run your VPN, the company will have as much insight into your online activities as your ISP. If a VPN provider wants to spy on your traffic, monetize your activities, or give your personal information to law enforcement agencies, it's very easy to do. For this reason, it is important to understand the company's privacy policy and the legal framework under which the company operates.

In general, it seems that Surfshark does a good job of protecting user privacy. However, security only works with trust. If you feel like you can't trust a company, look elsewhere.

I am pleased to see that Surfshark has revised its privacy policy and terms of use to make it more readable. There are sections that explain concepts in plain English. TunnelBear takes a similar approach, and other companies would do well to emulate it.

Surfshark emphasizes in its policy documents that IP addresses, browsing history, bandwidth used, network traffic or even connection timestamps are not logged. This is exactly what you want to hear from a VPN company. I suspect the company is able to partially guarantee this level of anonymity because it doesn't limit the number of devices or connections and therefore doesn't have to monitor its users as carefully.

The company collects some information, including aggregated analytics, as well as account information and billing history. The company also notes that it is getting advertising IDs from third parties, citing Google Play as an example. These are identifiers that you can reset yourself and that are used in place of immutable IDs like your phone's IMEI. A representative from Surfshark explained to me that these IDs are used to determine if the company's advertising is driving installations. The app does not contain any ads. I appreciate the disclosure in the documentation, but Surfshark should better contextualize the use of these ids.

Company representatives have told me that it is a highly decentralized organization with offices in Cyprus, Germany and the UK and remote employees in China, Finland, India, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Ukraine and the US. I appreciate the company's transparency on this point.

The company has a live warrant canary on its website, which also serves as a transparency report. Most of them Warrant Canaries is a single line that, when removed, subtly indicates that the company has received a National Security Letter or similar request that would prevent Surfshark from disclosing the existence of the letter. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, something bad happens when Surfshark removes the page. This page is slightly different in that it shows the number of requests for information the company has received. If the company is contacted by law enforcement for information, it will not be able to identify an individual user.

Many VPN companies have started commissioning third-party audits to verify what the company says about customer privacy and security. Surfshark commissioned such an audit of its Firefox and Chrome browser plug-ins in 2018, which received a glowing rating from the auditors of Cure53. A review of the plug-ins is certainly valuable, but I don't think it goes far enough to assess the company's privacy practices and the security and effectiveness of its core VPN product. Hopefully future audits will provide this security. The company announces that it will publish a new audit sometime in 2020. TunnelBear, on the other hand, has committed itself to annual audits of its service.

Hands on with Surfshark

In this review, I tested Surfshark on an Intel NUC Kit NUC8i7BEH desktop (Bean Canyon) running the latest version of Windows 10. On Windows, Surfshark offers a small, sleek app with flat colors and a smart design that expands and shrinks to show more or less information. It looks like you'd expect a modern app to look like. I especially like that there is a clear and obvious way to get online instantly, and that it allows you to select specific servers, not just entire countries. It's not quite as friendly as TunnelBear, but it's very clean like the best mobile apps. In fact, it looks pretty much like a mobile app floating on top of the Windows desktop.

You can select a server at the country or city level and view the load on that server. You can also make a location a favorite for future use. It doesn't seem possible to choose between individual servers in the same location - an advanced feature that can be helpful if you're having trouble accessing certain websites and services.

Surfshark offers a surprising number of advanced features, such as: B. Split tunneling, referred to above as whitelister. This tool allows you to specify which sites and applications to route outside of the VPN tunnel by adding URLs or applications to a list. Anything on the whitelist will not be slowed down or blocked by the VPN if the site or service is blocking VPN users. It is also not encrypted. It's a handy tool when you have low security tasks that require bandwidth, such as Streaming video, or critical sites blocking VPN use such as B. some banks.

A kind of opposite of Whitelister is Multihop, which does exactly what it says on the tin. You can set up your VPN connection through multiple VPN servers instead of just one. This further obscures your online activities, even for parts of the Surfshark infrastructure, much like a very simplified Tor network. The downside is that you will experience even more latency and reduced upload and download speeds. Unfortunately, you cannot choose two locations at random. Nevertheless it's a rare feature that I loved to see on the app.

Also noteworthy is the camouflage mode, which disguises your VPN traffic as normal HTTPS web traffic. Other VPNs have this feature under different names (TunnelBear calls it GhostBear, for example). It is especially useful if you are in an area where the use of VPNs is blocked.

With VPNs, there is a risk of losing your DNS information or your IP address. During my tests, I found that Surfshark successfully hid my real IP and ISP information. Using the DNS leak test tool, I confirmed that at least on the server I was using, Surfshark was not forwarding my DNS requests to my ISP.

Surfshark and Netflix

Depending on where you live, video streaming services like Netflix can serve different content. A VPN allows you to fake your location and jump to a remote VPN location to access content that is not available at home. Because of this, Netflix aggressively blocks the use of VPNs.

Beyond VPN

To stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace, several VPN companies have started adding additional features to their products beyond VPN protection. For example, TunnelBear has a standalone password manager called Remembear and a browser plug-in for blocking bears. Hotspot Shield VPN is perhaps the best example. When you sign up there, you'll get a Pango account that connects you to a variety of privacy and security products that are included in the subscription fee. Both ProtonVPN and TorGuard have encrypted email services: ProtonMail and Private Mail, respectively.

Surfshark has developed several privacy tools that go beyond VPN protection: a custom DNS service that provides additional privacy and is known as Smart DNS; an ad blocker with the CleanWeb brand; HackLock, which warns you when your accounts have been compromised, similar to HaveIBeenPwned; and a privacy-related organic search tool called BlindSearch. Note that both HackLock and BlindSearch require an additional $ 0.99 per month. It's a good start, but not particularly convincing given the high price of the core service.

Speed and performance

When you turn on a VPN, you add more computers and physical distance to your Internet connection, resulting in slower performance. To get a feel for this deterioration, I use the Ookla Speedtest tool to calculate a percentage change between test batches run with a VPN and tests without a VPN. Check out the aptly titled How We Test VPNs feature to learn how we test VPNs. (Note that Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, who also owns PCMag.)

In my testing, I found that Surfshark only lowered the upload speed test results by 4.5 percent from baseline. This is the best result I've seen for this test so far. The service scored remarkably well in both the latency and download tests, just below the high score in both cases. Download speed test scores were reduced by 28.3 percent and latency was increased by only 35.3 percent.