I got surfshark, Still have the plan for 1 more year. and i also got NordVPN. at first surfshark kept crashing and exposing me to the net. but about 6 months in to it, and after a lot of updates it got more stable. the only complaint was since my PC is on 24/7 I found the surfshark connection to slow to a crawl after a period of time. this caused issues while at work when i tried to remote connect to my NAS. i would come home, and have to restart surfshark, or in some cases reboot the PC. My son has NORDVPN. and i do admit, it was stable, but not much faster than surfshark. But i rarely had a slow down. i use 2 torrent Apps for testing. and NordVPN has socks5 proxies. I tested those and found them to work well, So i thought. i had 2 torrent APPS. 1 with nordVPN running and 1 without. I setup a proxy socks 5 server connection on both and did an ipleak test. Nord Passed. it showed other IPS. I then tested all my connections to ensure my ip was masked. and tested a download on the TORRENT. NOTE: I at no time turned off NORDVPN. and today i got a DMCA notice in the mail. I had tried the same test with Surfshark. it too passed the IP leak test showing nothing from my ISP. I ran surfshark for 6 months and Randomly downloaded test files to see how secure it was. no DMCA notices. This made me wonder. How did nordVPN fail? was my socks5 Proxy at fault? even though it showed i was downloading from a NORDVPN server? or was the PROXY not secure at all. this left me perplexed. as surfshark outperformed NORD VPN on security and PRIvacy.my only complaints with surfshark was it did not have PROXY servers , and Idle time more that 6 hours would cause my bandwidth to slow to a crawl or stop causing me to have to reboot. last observation: when rebooting under surfshark, surfshark loaded first then my Torrent app. NORDVPN loads AFTER the TORRENT app.
while both VPNS seem good. I will have to say, surfshark was better at Privacy and security. as to where NORDVPN let me down. I still have no idea how i got an DCMA notice on Nord. but they have an ISSUE on security. and it needs to be fixed. For the time being. I will go back to SurfShark. NOTE: the torrent downloads is not what i used surfshark or Nord VPN for, i just used it to test for Privacy and to see how secure they are. I actually use it for connecting to my home NAS server while at work. and to log in to my crypto miners. to ensure they are working correctly. My son used NORDVPN. I used surfshark. and this was an interesting find.
am i saying dont trust NORDVPN? no, but i Dont think the Proxy Socks 5 servers are secure, and at this point cant be trusted. unless there is an issue with the VPN. I suspect that is the issue. I installed the PRoxy as a fail safe in case the VPN should fail. Im not a pro reviewer, but thought i would bring this up for people whom are looking for a VPN that is low cost, and reliable. My opinion Surf Shark has won this argument. my only suggestion would be to see if they can find a way to stabilize the connections. I know they are constantly improving the product. and i hope they tackle this.