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Is there any reason not to do this and use a provider instead? I have been shopping for a VPN service the last month, and this looks like the most appealing.
by fokinsean 9y ago
Is there any reason not to do this and use a provider instead?
I have been shopping for a VPN service the last month, and this looks like the most appealing.
- evook 9y agoDepends if you need a VPN Service integrated into your own AS or not.
- SerSwimsALot 9y agoSee my comment above, it's a tradeoff depending on if you trust the host provider or the VPN provider more really.
- tylerjd 9y agoIt depends on your threat model. Are you just wanting to get around your ISP selling your personal data and (in the future) slowing down your internet to certain sites? Host a VPS at DO or Linode or AWS (though you'll look a lot like a bot). This way is also useful for hosting things at your house, but have them look and act as if they are hosted in your provider's DC. Are you trying to partially anonymize yourself on the internet and download Linux ISOs? Use a provider like PIA. The benefit of those is you're going to (probably) be connected to a node with dozens of others, certain entities would be dissuaded from tracking you, and cease and desist letters stop at PIA and never make it to you, as they don't maintain logs. If you really want to be anonymous and not be able to be tracked by even governments, TOR is really your only option.
- fokinsean 9y agoMostly I just want to get around ISP tracking. In that case I might just look into this solution and host on AWS. > partially anonymize yourself on the internet and download Linux ISOs...cease and desist letters stop at PIA You can get cease and desist orders for downloading Linux ISOs?
- Spivak 9y agoDo you want anonymity, because then you probably want a VPN service. All the traffic from your personal VPN is tied to your instance which is owned by you. The traffic isn't being merged with anyone else.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoIf you want anonymity, you use Tor.
- dguido 9y agoHi! Author of Algo here. You can read the full information about why we think a self-hosted VPN is better than a VPN service here: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/12/12/meet-algo-the-vpn-that-works/ https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/12/12/meet-algo-the-vpn-th...
- curun1r 9y agoBandwidth cost? Uploading a TB of VPN'd data would cost you $90 on AWS and a bit more on GCP. There are VPN providers that will let you do that for under $5/mo. Also, if you want your public IP to be in a specific country, the cloud providers don't have regions in a lot of the smaller countries where VPN providers have servers. Or perhaps you if you want to jump around periodically (today I want my internet traffic to look like it's coming from Peru, tomorrow France, etc). To do that with VPS, you'd need to provision a bunch of them. My VPN provider also has a features like nodes that route traffic through TOR or something they call "double VPN" where the VPN server connects to the internet through one of their other VPN servers. These are, perhaps, gimmicky features from a security standpoint, but if they're doing what they claim to and they've been implemented without introducing any vulnerabilities (big if), they could offer protection that would be expensive and complicated to setup yourself.