Surfshark Review

Surfshark is a relatively new company on the VPN market, but where is it based?

Founded in 2018, Surfshark is based in the British Virgin Islands – one of the most sensible jurisdictions in the world to base your VPN service.

There are no obligatory data retention laws in the British Virgin Islands, and it has no connection to any global data sharing schemes between governments.

Your data and information are well and truly safe from government snooping. 

There’s also the nice feature of a warrant canary on the Surfshark website that provides a daily update on the company’s interactions with law enforcement: to this day it has never received a gagging order, warrant or National Security letter.

Excerpt from Surfshark privacy policy

We dove deep into Surfshark’s privacy policy. 

We’ve resurfaced with some bad news: Surfshark collects data.

What data it collects is:

• Aggregated performance data
• Frequency of use of the service
• Unsuccessful connection attempts and “other similar information” 

Surfshark are keen to express that none of this is “identifiable information” and is collected for diagnostic purposes.

That’s true, and many top VPN providers collect temporary metadata or usage stats in order to maintain its service, including our #1 suggestion ExpressVPN. 

For this reason, it’s not something to worry about too much, but many are seeking that holy grail among VPN services — a no logs.

If you’re not puritan about this, there’s no reason not to consider Surfshark as your VPN. It’s a safe and private choice. 

Surfshark is not a slow VPN, but it can’t compete with the speeds of the best VPN services. 

Surfshark’s same-country download speeds are noticeably slower than the fastest VPNs we’ve seen, but they’ll still be more than enough for casual VPN users.

One thing we can say for Surfshark is the consistency of its connections. There were barely any fluctuations in our testing, with the connection never once dropping.

Surfshark even performed well over longer distances, such as Japan and Australia. It may not be enough to stream in Ultra HD across multiple devices, it’ll certainly do the job for most everyday users.

Uploads are consistently better across the board and ping latency is okay, although perhaps not enough for gamers to consider Surfshark. 

Surfshark even performed well over longer distances, such as Japan and Australia. It may not be enough to stream in Ultra HD across multiple devices, it’ll certainly do the job for most everyday users. 

Download speed without Surfshark: 92Mbps

Download speed with Surfshark: 76Mbps

Our download speed loss when Surfshark is running 18%

We put all of the VPNs on the site through a rigorous scientific speed testing process, determining the average speeds from multiple locations across the globe. These are the average speeds you can expect to pick up from these locations:

• USA: 34Mbps (download) & 40Mbps (upload)
• Germany: 56Mbps (download) & 76Mbps (upload)
• Singapore: 25Mbps (download) & 8Mbps (upload)
• Australia: 19Mbps (download) & 3Mbps (upload)

Surfshark’s 100+ location server network is not the most we’ve seen, but it is higher than the industry average and certainly enough to deliver the speeds you need.

1000+ IP addresses is a small number when compared to top-tier VPN services, but it will work to protect your anonymity and provide a reliable connection. This is especially the case in the more popular server locations. 

26 locations in the US available to connect to is a fair distribution and three in the UK should do the job.

Three locations in Canada – Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver – may seem few for such a large region, but it covers both coasts and so helps to spread coverage more evenly.

100 servers in five locations in Australia is good, covering the south and east coast of the nation quite well, but it could do with some northern distribution to equalize coverage. 

But Surfshark only provides two locations in Africa — South Africa and Libya — which is far from extensive for such a huge area.

Surfshark VPN server list

Surfshark consistently unblocks Netflix both in the US and the UK. Surfshark also works with BBC iPlayer, which is often difficult to access with other VPNs.

It also unblocks a further 12 Netflix libraries: Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Netherlands, India, South Korea, Italy, Australia, Turkey, Brazil, and Singapore.

We used to be only able to access BBC iPlayer through the Surfshark browser extension, but we’ve had success in recent tests through the app alone.

There’s also something called Surfshark Smart DNS – but what is it?

Surfshark Smart DNS helps to unlock content more reliably on devices that don’t support VPN functionality, although it also doesn’t offer as much protection as the full VPN service (it does not encrypt your traffic), so think carefully before using it. 

Surfshark also works with:

• Disney+
• Amazon Prime Video
• Hulu
• Sky
• HBO
• Kodi

While you can torrent on any Surfshark server that you like, traffic is automatically channeled to servers that are optimized for it. These include:

• US
• UK
• Canada
• Germany
• Italy
• Poland
• Spain
• Norway
• Denmark
• Luxembourg
• Hong Kong
• Singapore
• Netherlands

If you’re in Europe or Asia and outside of the UK, it will be routed through the Surfshark Netherlands server. If you’re in the Americas but outside of the US or Canada, it will route through Canadian servers.

This way, you get top-notch speeds.

These P2P connections include streaming players:

• Ace Player
• VLC
• PopcornTime

They also include torrent software:

• BitTorrent
• qBitTorrent
• Transmission
• Vuze
• uTorrent.

Surfshark’s good privacy policy and the inclusion of a kill switch makes torrenting extra safe for users. 

Those who use their connection for a lot of P2P traffic should take a look at our list of the best VPNs for torrenting. 

It used to be quite an effort to get Surfshark working in censored countries, such as China.

They’ve since removed the requirement to download a specially configured file, and now the Surfshark app automatically recognises if you’re trying to connect within a censored country.

Detecting this, Surfshark turns on ‘NoBorders Mode’. This is a big improvement.

Surfshark offers a reliable solution that extends to other high censorship countries like Russia, UAE, and Turkey. 

It’s unfortunate that Surfshark’s ability to bypass censorship is not complemented by a range of servers in neighboring free-speech countries.

While it may bypass Turkish or UAE censorship, there are no servers in the Middle East with the sole exception of Israel.

Still, with China and Russia, there are enough neighboring nations to allow decent speeds when connected.

Surfshark’s Windows app offers the choice of OpenVPN, our personal favorite protocol for making you safe. But if you’re using Surfshark on a different platform then you’ll need to navigate a bit of manual configuration to get OpenVPN. 

Its AES-256 encryption is widely regarded as near-uncrackable and our testing confirmed that Surfshark has no DNS or IP leaks – plus there’s an ad-blocker and kill switch.

Special mention should also go to the MultiHop feature, which routes your traffic through two different VPN servers for extra security (albeit slower speeds) and Surfshark’s split tunneling, which keeps you connected while letting certain apps and websites operate outside of the VPN.

Surfshark also offer plenty of extra security features, such as CleanWeb (blocks malware), BlindSearch (private search tool) and HackLock (a data leak alert), and have ChaCha encryption as a manual choice for Android users

Surfshark’s browser extensions, however, don’t come with WebRTC leak protection to prevent DNS leaks. 

Surfshark’s app looks great and it’s responsive, too.

The Surfshark app is so minimal, in fact, that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was oversimplified. However, all the setting to control the more advanced features of the VPN are hidden away behind a single settings menu – they’re smartly grouped and clearly labeled so there is never any doubt about what you’re doing. 

Surfshark definitely has one of the easiest VPN browser extensions around. Just click the shark fin on your browser and location options pop-up. Click once more and watch it swiftly connect.

You won’t find around-the-clock live chat support as snappy and well-informed anywhere else at this price – in fact, most VPNs as cheap as Surfshark won’t have it at all.

Agents were always standing by to answer our questions quickly and pleasantly.

Surfshark’s online help sections don’t have the same level of depth as we’ve seen from some higher-scoring rivals, but they cover off the basics well.

You can always send off an email for anything that’s not covered.

VPNs as good and as cheap as Surfshark are few and far between. A two-year subscription to Surfshark costs the equivalent of $1.99 per month – an 83% saving over the month-by-month cost and a real deal.

Surfshark’s 30-day money-back guarantee period is one of the more generous offerings we’ve seen, and it truly is no-questions-asked – just hop on to the 24/7 live chat and let the support agent know that you want to cancel.

There’s also a seven-day free trial if you’d rather see what you’re in for before investing, available through the Google Play and Apple store. 

Surfshark offers the usual range of payment options including:

• Debit Card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover) & Credit Card
• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Ripple
• PayPal
• GooglePay
• AliPay
• Amazon Pay
• Apple Pay

Privacy-conscious users will be pleased to see so many cryptocurrencies, although the most privacy-conscious individuals may have liked to have seen cash payments, which are not available.

It may be a new name to many, but over a year of regularly testing Surfshark has convinced us that it’s a reliable, trustworthy VPN with plenty of additional features.

Surfshark is constantly improving its service, it’s feature-filled, and has a trustworthy jurisdiction and privacy policy.