VPNShazam Review [Is It Any Good?]

Welcome back to Top Dog Apps. It’s yet another fine day in VPN review world as we come out with our VPNShazam VPN review. I bet you thought Shazam was only an app you can use to identify songs you hear in public, right? Wrong! The name Shazam can also be used to refer to VPNShazam, a service that can hide your identity online. But, are they any good? Read on to get the lowdown….

What is VPNShazam?

VPN Shazam is a VPN service that hails from Israel. It took me a while to work this out as they don’t exactly state this clearly on their website. On a side note, I don’t know why so many of the lesser known VPNs do this, as it’s not exactly helping the confidence I have in them! Anyway, after a bit of digging on Linkedin and Twitter, I discovered they are based in Palestine/ Israel.

At first I thought VPNShazam would be a pretty bog standard VPN service, but they did surprise me with one fairly unique feature. They are pushing the dedicated IP option, something that many other VPN companies offer but don’t push as hard. So if you are in the market for a dedicated IP, this may be your bag.

Other than this, they run a pretty standard VPN service. Here are the main features listed on their website:

• Load balancing technology to increase server speed
• Unlimited server switching
• 1800 servers from 6 continents
• 5 simultaneous connections
• No logs of client usage on their network
• High-speed connections, ideal for streaming
• Unlimited bandwidth

How Much is VPNShazam?

Their regular VPN is called the Turbo VPN, and they have packages starting from $8.99 a month all the way up to $2.49 a month if you are willing to sign up for two years up front. This is pretty standard pricing for most VPN services. My current gold standard service I recommend is Pure VPN and their prices are virtually identical.

If you are more interested in the dedicated IP option, that would cost you from $9.99 a month all the way to just over $4 if you are willing to sign up for two years outright. The dedicated IP can only be used on one server, although they do give you access to the regular dynamic IP VPN network when you buy a dedicated plan, which is handy.

What Do We Like About VPNShazam?

Dedicated IP Option

The dedicated IP plan that they offer is at a really competitive price when you compare to a lot of the competition. This plan is also available in a decent amount of server locations too. And the fact they throw in a dynamic IP plan alongside the dedicated one makes it a compelling option for anyone that wants this kind of thing.

Can Get Incredibly Cheap

The regular VPN plans are not that cheap, as stated above. However, VPNShazam have been known to offer some pretty crazy discounts from time to time. At the time of writing they have one on their website that halves the cost of a two-year plan. If you are patient you can get a really good deal on your VPN.

7 Day Refund Period

Although I always prefer a 30 day refund period at least, it is good to see that they have enough confidence in their service to offer a 7 day money-back guarantee.

Help Section

Thr VPNShazam website has a decent help section when compared to a lot of their competitors (apart from the ‘big boys’). It’s not crazy good or anything, but they certainly offer a decent selection of help articles and a thorough frequently asked questions section to support new customers.

Good Payment Options

It’s good to see a privacy based service such as this allowing their customers to pay in Bitcoin. In fact, VPNShazam have one of the widest selection of payment providers I have seen on a VPN, including all the popular options such as Paypal and Amazon Pay. This helps with the trust factor of the company, having so many well-known providers.

What Don’t We Like About VPNShazam?

Connection Issues

I would love to have given you a full down and dirty look at the server speeds VPNShazam offers, unfortunately I had so many connection bugs it was literally impossible for me to connect!

When trying to connect on the windows application, I tried many servers and every time it would take an age to connect and then give me an authentication failure.

I thought to myself it might be a problem with my computer, so I decided to try the mobile application. This time it wouldn’t connect because it kept flashing up that the username and password were wrong (even though it wasn’t).

I contacted support and all they could come up with was to change my password for me. Not exactly the most helpful in the world 🙂

Anyway, making it hard to connect to servers is kind of a service breaking problem, right! The billing area looks exactly the same as CAS VPN, another VPN service I couldn’t connect top for love nor money. Interesting……

Based in Israel

This is not a massive black mark, but certainly something the more privacy focused may want to consider. Although Israel is not currently named as one of the ‘enemies of the internet’, it is speculated that they may be a possible third party contributor to the eyes network of countries.

In my lifetime, I have also seen some pretty ‘dodgy’ companies originating from Israel. For example, a lot of the bad eggs in the binary options world (a type of financial trading) came out of Israel. The lack of protection Israel gave to those scammed was pretty alarming, but of course I am sure there are a lot of legit businesses there too!

No iOS or Linux Native Support

The accessibility of VPNShazam is not that great, frankly. They have a windows app and an Android app, but that’s about it. They do talk about how you can use their network on other platforms, but this often descends into an ocean of complicated technical instructions. If you are not on Android or Windows, you may struggle unless you are good with technology. See below if you don’t believe me 🙂

Confusing Pricing

I find the pricing of this service a little strange. As well as the regular pricing page detailed above, they currently have a ‘best VPN offer’ pricing page in addition. This simply says ‘Turbo VPN Offer’ and gives you a two year dynamic IP plan for $34.99 (pretty much half the normal price).

Why have this special offer on a different page? What happens if someone misses this page and pays full price? I much prefer the usual practice of putting any offers on the main pricing page for everyone to see. That makes things a lot simpler!

No Logs?

They state no logs in their promotional material but fall into the trap of not explicitly stating this in their privacy policy as well (weirdly, their privacy policy is the same as their terms and conditions page). They tell us they what they do collect but not explicitly what they don’t, something any privacy focused business should do as a matter of course.

That Logo

The website design on this service is not too bad (compared to a lot of other services I have been reviewing lately anyway!). It’s still far from easy on the eye, but it’s nothing to get overly bothered by.

The logo, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. It looks so outdated and almost like a child made it in MS Paint or something, it totally brings down the feel of the whole service. After seeing this logo, it gives me the impression this service is ‘cheap and cheerful’.

With any business, the quality of their logo plays a big part in the first impression I have of said business. For the life of me, in a day and age when logo design is so cheap and freely available, I don’t know why they would go for something so tacky looking!

Should You Subscribe to VPN Shazam?

If you are looking for a regular dynamic IP service, probably not. Why would you go for something with so many negatives when you could have my current gold standard Pure VPN for pretty much the same price.

However, if you are after a dedicated IP on a smaller budget, you might be willing to forgive some of these negatives to get a good deal on this. Although I would test it first to see if you get the same connection errors I got.