NordVPN Referral Code

NordVPN and Surfshark are the two most frequently compared VPNs on the internet. They merged on 2 February 2022. Both facts are true, and almost no comparison mentions the second.

NordVPN is operated by Nord Security. On 2 February 2022 Nord Security merged with Surfshark, and the two companies have continued to operate independently, retaining separate infrastructure and user bases.

That structure is worth stating plainly because of how these two products are normally encountered. NordVPN versus Surfshark is one of the most common head-to-head comparisons in consumer software, produced endlessly by review sites and YouTube channels, and it is a comparison between two brands under one owner. The independence of operations is real — they are not a single service with two names — but the competitive tension a comparison implies is not what it appears.

The other major consolidation in this market is covered on our Private Internet Access page: Kape Technologies, formerly the adtech business Crossrider, owns PIA, ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and ZenMate, and a collection of VPN review websites. Put the two groups together and a very large share of the VPNs a consumer will ever be recommended belongs to one of two owners.

This matters more in VPNs than it would in most categories, because a VPN is a company you route all of your traffic through. You are not buying software; you are choosing whose infrastructure sees your connections and whose word you are taking about what happens to the records. Ownership, jurisdiction and corporate history are therefore part of the product rather than background information about it.

On the reward: consumer VPN schemes are affiliate programmes rather than referrals in the ordinary sense. Commission is paid on a sale, frequently at a substantial fraction of the first subscription payment, with tiered rates for volume and payment usually released after the refund window closes. This site has flagged the same substitution on Todoist, ZuluTrade, Fiverr, Eventbrite and elsewhere. The practical consequence is not that recommendations are worthless, but that the density of VPN recommendations online is a function of commission rates rather than of how much people love VPNs.

If you want to evaluate NordVPN on its merits, the testable questions are the same ones that apply to any provider: what jurisdiction the company operates under and what that jurisdiction can compel; whether the no-logs claim has been independently audited, and how recently; whether the clients are open-source and reproducible; and what happens to your traffic if the tunnel drops unexpectedly. NordVPN publishes audits and has a long operating record, which is a genuine point in its favour and is a separate question from who it merged with.