While it’s concerning that Surfshark made no attempt to differentiate between physical and virtual server locations on their website, I would like to thank Jimmy from Surfshark support for going the extra mile and pulling this list from the Surfshark app. Number of countries with physical servers: 100 - 43 = 57 Props to Jimmy for helping pull a list of servers from the app Screenshots from Surfshark showing numerous virtual server "locations" Number of countries with physical servers: 94 - 47 = 47 Literally half of ExpressVPNs locations are faked SurfsharkĬountries that are virtual server locations: 43 Now that we have established how the use of virtual server locations benefits the marketing team of the VPN company providing it (and possibly their infrastructure costs by not having to pay for premium bandwidth) at the cost of impeded performance for its users, let’s analyze how many countries some of our competitors actually operate physical servers in: ExpressVPNĬountries that are virtual server locations: 47 Hat-tip to the folks at mtr.tools - the tool that made this demonstration possible by playing the Ecuadorian user in our example! The Exposé This is what the ping should look like if the server is physically hosted in your location
In contrast, for a Windscribe user located in Ecuador who wants to connect to a server in Ecuador (for the lowest latency), connecting to Windscribe’s Ecuador location would result in a client-server connection latency of <1 ms (since the client is in Ecuador, and the server is also in Ecuador). That's a ridiculous ping for a server that claims to be physically in the same location as the device Windscribe’s Ecuador location on the other hand is actually hosted in Ecuador.įor an ExpressVPN user located in Ecuador and wanting to connect to a server in Ecuador (for the lowest latency), connecting to ExpressVPN’s “Ecuador” location would result in a client-server connection latency of >150 ms (since the client is in Ecuador, but the server is in Brazil). To demonstrate the point, ExpressVPN specifies that its Ecuador location is actually hosted in Brazil. You'd hope that someone working there would think these things through Looking at Latency Impact This might not be an issue that affects most users but the disregard for user agency is still shameful. They continue to pursue their activism whilst believing they have an extra layer of protection against, for example, wiretapping only to find they have been misled into connecting to a VPN server located physically in Hong Kong. Take ExpressVPN’s “Taiwan” location, for example: a protester/activist from Hong Kong might want to connect to “Taiwan” to go the extra mile and choose a VPN endpoint outside the jurisdiction of Hong Kong / China. There are more insidious considerations for some users, though, like potential legal repercussions for anyone looking to connect to servers in specific countries because of privacy protections afforded by the laws of the said country. This results, first and foremost, in subpar performance for users - a reality conveniently ignored by our competitors for a few extra bucks at the cost of honesty. Most providers operating virtual server locations run the actual server in countries with low bandwidth costs while faking the location with false IP WHOIS data to make it appear that it is elsewhere. A virtual server location is one for which the actual physical server exists in a location that is not the claimed/advertised location. The inflated country counts are facilitated by virtual server locations. The Virtual Server Fakeout HideMyAss is so prolific, it has servers in more countries than there are in the world! In the VPN industry, one of the most common baits by shady VPNs is how many countries they have server locations in. In modern days, some marketers still embellish, obfuscate, and lie.
SCRIBE MEDIA FULL
In ye olden days, it was the likes of the traveling “exotic goods” salesman with a cart full of strange items of which he makes dubious claims of value, history, or even magic.
Throughout the history of commerce, there have been less-than-honest folks that are happy to embellish the truth here and fabricate a clever lie there so they can make a quick buck.
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