VPN Servers: Secure VPN Locations List - Surfshark (2024)

Bypasses your local DNS and associated blocks.

Hides the fact that you’re using a VPN.

Supports these modes of OpenVPN protocol.

Supports WireGuard and IKEv2 VPN protocols.

Supports connections from the Surfshark browser extensions.

If by “best” you mean “fastest”, then select “Fastest server” to get the best speeds. As VPN speed largely depends on how close you are to the server, this is likely to be one in the neighboring country.

Of course, if you want to be connecting from a specific country, you can choose any of the servers presented on the app.

A VPN server is a server your VPN app connects to and routes all your data through. This enables two main things:

• Encryption: The data leaving your device is encrypted, making it useless to anyone intercepting it.
• Changing location: Any website or service you visit will consider you to be connecting from the location of the VPN server, hiding your real IP address and overcoming censorship.

From the hardware side, all Surfshark servers are RAM-only (meaning that whatever data of yours passes through the server would be lost if someone seized and disconnected it) and have at least a single 1Gbps port (upgrades to 10 Gbps are in progress).

A virtual location is when a VPN server only appears to be located somewhere, but its physical location is somewhere else. For example, a virtual server in Germany can be physically present in France.

The downside of virtual locations is response time, since the server location might not be where you’d expect. However, they may actually have better speeds than you’d get from a server that’s physically there. That’s because the virtual server may be physically located in a country with a better internet infrastructure than if it had been in the real country.

If you’re looking to create your own VPN server, a service like Surfshark isn’t what you’re looking for. You can probably fiddle with OpenVPN or rent out a server at a server farm.

However, the absolute majority of everyday internet users don’t need such a thing. For your daily browsing security and privacy needs, Surfshark VPN is more than enough (did we mention we have 3200+ servers?), and is both cheaper and easier to use to boot!

Depends on what you’re asking about. No, it is not free to set up and run a VPN server: you need specialized knowledge and hardware and a constant power supply as well as an ISP to keep it hooked to the internet.

However, if you’re asking if you need to pay to use a specific server as a Surfshark VPN user, then no. As soon as you subscribe to the service, you can connect to any of the Surfshark servers and switch between them as many times as you’d like.

When you visit a website, you need its URL, for example, www.surfshark.com. But a device doesn’t understand the addresses. Instead, it pings a DNS (Domain Name System) service, which translates the URL into an IP address a device can use. For example, ours is 104.27.181.81 (as of the time this was written).

It would be difficult to remember all IP addresses of available sites, so DNS (Domain Name System) essentially does that for you. It converts hostnames into IP addresses so that your computer can understand and communicate with the website you want to visit.

Internet service providers’ DNS or third-party DNS providers often pose colossal privacy risks. They can use records of your DNS requests to track your activity and use them for marketing purposes (such as displaying personalized ads). A DNS can be a tool of censorship as well, with governments telling local DNS providers to block certain websites.

If your privacy is important to you - and it should be - private DNS becomes of paramount importance. And all Surfshark servers support private DNS.