SaferVPN test and review
SaferVPN is a company that has become famous for providing free VPN subscriptions to victims of the “system” in countries such as Turkey, Iran and Bangladesh, where censorship has been imposed. As a result, many activists have been given the opportunity to change their geolocation and continue their pro-social work. A very noble initiative and a big plus at the very start, but what can the average “Kowalski” expect from SaferVPN?
Is SaferVPN safe?
SaferVPN LLC is a company registered in New York. Although the company is located in the USA, SaferVPN boasts that it doesn’t collect any logs concerning its customers. It also doesn’t store any personal data, metadata or history of IP addresses and web pages viewed. All data coming and going to our device is encrypted with a cryptographic key in the AES-256 standard. Control messages are secured in turn in the SHA256 standard. Both of the above algorithms are considered by modern cyber security experts as impossible to break, even by military grade supercomputers.
In order to make communication and data decoding at the destination possible at all, a number of advanced protocols – led by IKEv2 and OpenVPN, L2TP/IPSec and PPTP – take care of it. They’re used for secure exchange of encryption keys. IKEv2 itself (Internet Key Exchange version 2) was created in cooperation with Microsoft and Cisco, who have been leading industry tycoons for years. It’s currently the fastest key exchange method, characterized by a high level of reliability and stability. In addition, PFS (Perfect ForwardSecrecy) technology is used, which every 60 minutes of active VPN connection, changes the security keys, ensuring that even if by some miracle someone breaks them, it will only have access to your network connection for one hour.
If the above information tells you absolutely nothing, you don’t have to worry about it. SaferVPN will automatically select the best connection parameters available for your device and establish a VPN tunnel. You can purchase a subscription using a variety of payment methods, including Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express credit cards. If you think that physical cards are unfashionable, SaferVPN also provides a PayPal payment option. There’s also something for fans of decentralized cryptovalut fans – you can buy VPN service by paying with Bitcoin or Tron.
How much does a SaferVPN subscription cost?
SaferVPN provides an offer tailored to everyone’s needs, and discounts increase with the length of the selected plan. A monthly subscription costs USD 12.95, or nearly PLN 55. It’s quite an expense, clearly more expensive than what the competition offers. What is important, however, even before deciding to purchase this VPN service, we can test it, receiving a trial period, along with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, conditional on a full refund. If you already consider SaferVPN to be a tailor-made service, you may want to consider buying a longer, annual plan. Its monthly cost is USD 5.49 (about PLN 23), or a 2-year commitment for which you have to pay USD 3.29 (less than PLN 14) from your wallet. An even more advantageous version of the subscription is the purchase of a 3-year plan, which costs only USD 2.50 (a little over PLN 10).
Will SaferVPN unlock my Netflix?
SaferVPN has special servers, which have just been developed for broadband streaming of high definition content. Simply select the appropriate VPN node in the application, connect to it and then log in to your Netflix account. In case of problems or error messages, it’s recommended to log out, clear your cookies and browser cache and then log in to the streaming service again. SaferVPN will also help us unlock some YouTube content that has regional restrictions.
What download speeds does SaferVPN provide?
SaferVPN provides more than 1300 servers in 50 different countries and unlimited network traffic. The company prides itself on having modern and super-fast servers for potential customers. We have decided to find out what it’s like in practice. In order to make the test reliable, we first determined which transfers our Internet reaches. We did this using speedtest.net.
Without VPN enabled, the download speed was 152 Mbps, as well as the upload speed. The data delay was only 1 millisecond.
We were the first to test our national server. We immediately felt the deterioration of network parameters. Both download and upload speeds were down by about 30% and were 105 Mbps and 102 Mbps respectively. Ping remained at a low level of 13 milliseconds. Overall, this isn’t a bad result as we were still able to use the Internet and streaming services freely.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the American server. The result of the download speed of only 41 Mbps and the gigantic ping of 347 milliseconds makes the Internet run noticeably slower. We’re unlikely to be able to watch movies and series in 4k resolution using SaferVPN.
It’s not much better to connect to servers located in the UK. There, the download speed was almost 50 Mbps, and the ping has decreased to 58 milliseconds. This transfer rate is enough to consume FullHD content at maximum quality.
The same goes for the German connection. The download was 57 Mbps and the upload was 58 Mbps, with a ping of 51 milliseconds.
We’re not satisfied with SaferVPN speed. It may not be tragic, but the rest of the competition is still a long way off. We’re also worried about the long delays of data packets, which clearly worsen the feeling when using the Internet.
Can you download torrents via SaferVPN?
With a subscription, you’ll get unlimited access to three locations – Canada, Spain and the Netherlands – that allow you to exchange Peer to Peer (P2P) files. Unfortunately, they’re heavily loaded and have relatively low transfer rates, so you need to reserve more time for torrent downloads.
How easy is it to use SaferVPN?
SaferVPN offers a nice and clear application for Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS. In addition, if you don’t like to mess with your computer or smartphone, you can use the practical plugins for Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers, with which you can create a secure VPN tunnel with a few clicks. Another advantage of the browser plug-ins are functions that make blocking ads easier.
Summary
We have mixed feelings about SaferVPN. On the one hand, the company provides a trial version of the service with a 30-day satisfaction or money back guarantee, and two and three year subscription plans are very competitively priced. On the other hand, looking at the other side of the coin, SaferVPN offers low transfer speeds and high delays for sending and receiving data packets. We strongly recommend that you take advantage of the trial period and make your own decision to purchase this service.
Also, check our chart with the free VPN services!
