Surfshark Review

Surfshark temporarily collects data about which VPN server you connect to, including your user ID and connection timestamps. This is deleted within 15 minutes of disconnecting your VPN, and won’t compromise your anonymity.

The only datapoints that are permanently logged relate to your account information, such as your email address and account registration date. This is used to maintain the service and can largely be nullified by using an alias email and cryptocurrency upon sign-up.

Adding to that, Surfshark also operates diskless RAM servers that prevent your data from being written to a hard drive. This means that even if the VPN servers are physically seized by a criminal or law enforcement agent, nothing can be extracted.

If this isn’t enough to convince you to trust Surfshark, there are alternative VPNs which are actually no-logs, like PIA. This VPN service logs no data and it’s been proven by multiple real-world cases.

Clearing Up Surfshark’s Ties to NordVPN

Surfshark is owned by Cyberspace, a company incorporated in the Netherlands. Cyberspace is the result of a merger between Surfshark (Surfshark B.V.) and Nord Security, which runs NordVPN.

The two VPNs now work together to improve their separate services, although their products are not identical. In fact, NordVPN performs better in most of our tests and scores higher in our testing methodology.

Starting with Netflix, Surfshark unblocks a respectable 9 libraries, including the US, UK, and Canada. We didn’t pick up on any issues and it almost always worked on the first try, without our video buffering.

Our only complaint is that we wish it worked with more regions, given competitors like IPVanish can unblock 7 more libraries, and ExpressVPN 9 more, providing a greater variety of content.

We used Surfshark to stream Netflix titles from outside of our home region.

Within the US, Surfshark has come on leaps and bounds. Comparing our historic testing data to the present, it’s gone from struggling with Hulu to becoming one of our go-to choices. Likewise, it works with harder-to-unblock platforms such as Peacock and Paramount+.

Although, where the VPN really shines is in bypassing geo-restrictions on UK platforms. We love using it to stream UK TV via BBC iPlayer, Sky Go, and ITVX, and it’s our first-choice VPN for Disney+ (UK). We streamed in maximum video quality across all of these platforms, even when connecting from the US.

It’s also one of two VPNs — the other being Windscribe — to include a GPS spoofer on Android for bypassing GPS-based blocks. For example, we used Surfshark to rewrite our GPS location and stream an out-of-market NHL game on the ESPN+ mobile app.

Surprisingly, Surfshark wasn’t quite as reliable unblocking a handful of European geo-restricted platforms. For instance, we couldn’t get past the geo-blocks on the Austrian, Spanish, or Swiss versions of DAZN.

Surfshark triggers an error code on DAZN Austria.

All VPNs slow down your internet, Surfshark included, but you won’t notice it unless you connect much farther away from your real location. We can attribute this to its roll out of 10Gbps servers across its network, a move that the rest of the industry should follow.

Just as important, the VPN maintains the same consistent performance over hours of uptime. We never detected any sudden fluctuations in download speed or connection dropouts, even when performing multiple activities on our laptop.

Unlike most other VPNs, Surfshark didn’t massively impact our long-distance speeds until we were in excess of 8,000 miles away. For instance, our download dropped by just 16% connecting to Japan (6,700 miles), but this worsened to 33% when connecting further afield to South Africa.

To contextualize this, you can see how Surfshark compares to the very best VPNs for these kind of distances in the table below.

As you can see, the VPN struggles slightly more than its rivals, but not by much. To close the gap, Surfshark should continue to upgrade as many of its servers as possible to 10Gbps.

The VPN provides two ways of securing your connection: OpenVPN using AES-256 encryption, or WireGuard with ChaCha20. Both configurations are industry-backed, open-sourced, and, crucially, highly-secure.

We verified both using Wireshark, a data packet analyzer that inspects browser traffic. It confirmed that Surfshark successfully encrypted our PC’s connection, leaving the traffic completely unreadable.

Our network traffic was left indecipherable.

As part of the testing process, we also checked for IP, DNS, and WebRTC leaks. Surfshark passed on all accounts, ensuring that no sensitive data was ever exposed.

This is in part explained by the VPN using its own private DNS servers, which means all of your DNS requests (the websites you visit) are handled in-house. Normally, a third-party, like Google, would be able to read your DNS requests, effectively bypassing your VPN encryption.

An area where we felt Surfshark did let us down, is its kill switch. First of all, it isn’t enabled by default, leaving your personal data at risk should the VPN connection suddenly collapse. It also doesn’t activate when changing VPN servers on Mac, which is a common issue, but nevertheless quite annoying.

If you need to switch servers on a macOS device, then we strongly recommend you shut down all sensitive activity first. Having said that, Surfshark also deserves praise for being the only VPN to offer a built-in kill switch on Android TV.

Another minor grip we have is its lack of IPv6 support. Instead, Surfshark re-routes IPv6 connections to IPv4, which successfully prevents leaks, but can cause IPv6-enabled devices to stop working with the VPN. For instance, Surfshark won’t connect at all on an IPv6 WiFi router.

Using Surfshark, you can get IP addresses from countries in all six continents.

While we didn’t pick up on any glaring gaps in coverage, some noticeable locations were missing, such as: Bahrain, Jamaica, Kenya, and Senegal.

Surfshark’s US server coverage.

Most of Surfshark’s servers are based in a single city, but 11 countries have city-level options. This is a higher amount than IPVanish (8) and NordVPN (10).

The US has the most city choices — 25 in total, which is very useful if you want to get a US IP address in a specific city to watch blacked-out NFL games.

Although it has IP addresses in 100 countries, Surfshark only has 4,500 individual servers. This is significantly less than the 18,651 offered by Private Internet Access, or the 12,000 offered by CyberGhost.

In general, our experience of using its apps couldn’t be more user-friendly. The apps are well designed and self-explanatory, and there are useful descriptions next to every technical feature.

That said, each app also comes with its own deficiencies that impact your day-to-day experience.

We’ve detailed the highs and lows of using Surfshark on every device, below:

Our download bitrate slowed by just 13% with Surfshark, which is better than most of the 61 VPNs we review. However, it is substantially slower than our leading P2P VPNs, including PIA and ExpressVPN, which have respective speed losses of 4% and 2%.

In practice, you can torrent most file sizes with Surfshark without any issues, but you may notice a slowdown for downloads exceeding 20GB.

Surfshark worked with every torrent client we tried.

Though not the fastest, Surfshark is definitely safe to use. As evidenced by its transparency reports, the VPN has never handed over user data following a DMCA request.

That is, as long as you toggle on Surfshark’s kill switch via its settings menu, since it’s not enabled by default. It’s essential you do so, before you seed or download any files.

Another frustration is that the VPN actually includes P2P-optimized servers, but they are not marked, listed, or advertised. To find them, type ‘P2P’ into the search bar of your app and a selection of servers will appear.

We tested Surfshark’s unlimited connection limit ourselves and were able to run the VPN on our test laptop, Fire TV, and iPhone, all at once. It doesn’t threaten to terminate your account if you share your Surfshark credentials with a friend, either.

One minor drawback is its lack of a dedicated router app, which would allow you to protect devices that don’t support VPN software (like game consoles). You can manually install the VPN onto a router, but it’s hard to do, or you can use its Smart DNS proxy which is great for streaming, but won’t encrypt your connection.

Unlike every other VPN, Surfshark doesn’t route your connection through a single VPN server. Instead, you are automatically connected to a network (nexus) of servers before you reach your endpoint.

Surfshark’s rotating IP feature is unlike any we’ve ever tested, thanks to Nexus.

This feature, known as Surfshark Nexus, is enabled by default and allows for a variety of unique features, as well as improving already-established features. We’ve detailed them below:

You can activate a tool within the Android app that overrides your GPS location and matches it to the VPN server you’re connected to.

Given most smartphones nowadays use GPS to find your exact location, this tool is essential for maintaining your privacy as well as unblocking the strictest geo-restrictions.

In fact, we’re always surprised that other VPN review sites don’t report on this highly underrated feature. We’ve used it countless times to avoid MLB blackouts without detection.

Aside from Windscribe, Surfshark is the only VPN to offer this hidden gem of a feature.

By connecting to our remote server in Shanghai, we regularly test Surfshark’s ability to bypass Chinese censorship.

All of our tests were performed using Surfshark’s ‘NoBorders’ mode, which is advertised as an anti-censorship tool.

Sadly, the VPN only worked in China 35% of the time: a poor result. However, it is one of the few VPNs that not yet been banned in Russia, so you can use it to bypass Russian censorship.

If circumventing online censorship is a must for you, then we recommend using Astrill VPN as it gets around ‘The Great Firewall’ with a 100% success rate.