TechRadar Verdict
Sahrzad VPN resells another provider’s VPN services, which is a common for new players on the VPN market, but the service is half-baked at best. There’s a desperate lack of clear information on the website, its speeds are poor and customer support is nowhere to be found.
Pros
- +
3-day trial
- +
Allows torrenting
Cons
- -
Poor speeds
- -
Horrible website
- -
No answer from the customer support
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Sahrzad VPN is a VPN service primarily aimed at the Middle Eastern market, designed to unblock online content typically unavailable in the region and provide anonymity on the internet. Sahrzad is a reseller for AeroShield VPN, but this is normal for a new VPN on the market.
Price
The vendor has a “free” 3-day trial (which actually costs $0.01), after which it charges for a full monthly subscription at $9.99/month. There’s an even shorter subscription length available: 1-week, charged $3.99/week.
These plans are followed by the 3-month option at $9.33/month, the 6-month plan at $8.99/month, as well as the one-year subscription at $7.49/month.
Payments can be made using PayPal or credit cards (we prefer PayPal due to better control over payments). In addition to the trial, Sahrzad also offers a 3-day money-back guarantee.
We have no idea how many simultaneous VPN connections you can run under this provider as there’s no clear information about it anywhere on the website and customer support hasn’t bothered to respond to our queries yet.
Alternatives
Sahrzad doesn’t even come close to today’s top VPN solutions. For example, ExpressVPN is just slightly more expensive, but offers thousands of servers, gorgeous native apps, 24/7 live customer support, and many other features that make it the best VPN service around.
It is closely followed by other prime examples, including NordVPN, Surfshark, and CyberGhost, all of which offer advanced platforms and are way cheaper than Sahrzad. This really isn’t a tough choice.
Streaming
Judging by its website, Sahrzad provides access to popular content from streaming platforms that are otherwise inaccessible in certain regions, including Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Amazon Prime and others.
However, since we were only able to access a server in The Netherlands, it was impossible to test whether Sahrzad unblocks any of the above services.
About the company
According to the website, the company operating Sahrzad VPN is located in Montreal, Canada. However, this seems to be the location of its reseller and our queries about its actual headquarters have been left unanswered.
We also couldn’t get any information pertaining to the number of VPN servers this provider offers access to. Our account was only given one server location in The Netherlands, so we’re assuming this number is quite low.
After a while, the website just stopped working and all of its pages appeared broken with error codes, leaving us uncertain whether the provider is still in business.
Privacy and encryption
This provider allows torrenting, but we couldn’t find any information about how it protects your privacy while you’re doing this and other activities while using its VPN, i.e. what encryption and protocols are used.
Ironically, when we tried to open the provider’s Privacy Policy page, we were warned about its invalid security certificate. We visited the page anyway, but it was broken and no information about its logging policies could be found.
Support
Sahrzad doesn’t have native clients but it does have pre-configured connection settings for Windows, as well as manual installation guides for iOS, Android, and Mac devices you can find on the website or the welcoming email when you sign up.
The website no longer seems to work, but when it did, it contained some useful yet very limited and unclear resources, such as setup guides, FAQ with only two blog-like entries, as well as how-to’s for various locations and purposes (such as torrenting).
However, if you require more help with the platform, in the form of direct contact with customer support, you can try email, but don’t get your hopes up as we got no response whatsoever.
Speed and experience
Downloading and installing this platform for Windows was easy enough, as all the links were provided in the welcome email. However, other platforms require some more work with the help of manual installation guides, which isn’t very beginner-friendly.
It seems users don’t get much choice as to which location they want to tunnel to. Testing download speeds on the one server location we were allowed, in the Netherlands, hailed a pathetic 2.6Mbps on a 65Mbps testing connection.
Verdict
We were seriously disappointed with Sahrzad VPN, and were left unsure as to whether the provider is even in business anymore. By the time we finished this review, it’s website wasn’t working, but we had already managed to draw plenty of conclusions supporting our belief that this platform is below any acceptable standard.
The only positive aspect was a 3-day free trial and the option to pay via PayPal, so the most we lost during this review was our time and $0.01.
In short, we don’t recommend this VPN at all and suggest you opt for a more reputable alternative.
