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Comment by shocks | Hacker News Reader

Is it better to go with a VPN service, or rent your own server and DIY?

It was clear the UK was going this way for a while so I switched to a small cloud host for VPN which exits in another country. $5 a month and it took only a couple of minutes to setup OpenVPN with a simple shell script[0].

Also important is to setup outbound firewall (or other mechanism) so that if the VPN goes down, you don't spew your traffic over the open connection [1].

I don't notice any speed difference from daily usage over the last year. Large file downloads I task my NAS to download outside the VPN.

My purpose is only to prevent the ISP from collecting logs about usage, I don't expect it to have much effect if I'm targeted for surveillance and I'm fine with that. Who knows how ISPs will handle the data (we've seen targeted advertising and content injection in the past) let alone all the agencies with less than stellar security practices.

[0]: https://github.com/thomascannon/scripts/tree/master/vpn [1]: https://github.com/thomascannon/scripts/tree/master/vpn/vpn-...

Very interesting, thanks for this.

Large downloads is a concern of mine. I downloaded 1TB over PIA this month and it was never a problem. I can probably do these outside the VPN though.

I've got a couple of cheap VPS's with OpenVPN installed and the bandwidth/latency is best described as "intermittent", as there'll be a lost of hosts sharing it on the low end ones.

NordVPN is one I keep seeing talked about, so I'll be looking into them this weekend :)

I heard good things about NordVPN and ExpressVPN. I've been using PIA for a year and it's about to expire - hence trying to decide what is next!

Advantages of a service seem to be location switching, good apps, cheap, and IP mixing.

Disadvantages are that you have to trust them not to keep logs, and lots of Cloudflare captchas, and they would seem like a good target for being compromised by the government.

Yea I'm in the same boat, seen a recommendation for AirVPN which seems very affordable and easy to use but then also those recommending to set your own up, is this doable without much knowledge in the area of VPNs?

Have a look at PureVPN also.

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