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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Not really an answer to any of the questions you asked, but I'll provide my perspective.

I don't use a VPN to hide my identity from the websites I'm connecting to. I use a VPN to hide the websites I'm connecting to from my ISP.

Residential ISPs in the UK are supposed to log a bunch of internet stuff (not clear exactly what), which is then made available warrant-free to over 40 government departments, including for purposes obviously unrelated to "national security" (not that that would make it OK), e.g. HMRC and the Food Standards Agency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

Additionally, I use a DigitalOcean VM and run OpenVPN myself, I don't get a service from a VPN company.

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> I use a DigitalOcean VM and run OpenVPN

I've been looking to do the same recently, do you use Digital Ocean Droplets? If so, how have you found the experience?

I've been using DO for my VPN needs and it's been a very good experience. You can start a 5$ Ubuntu droplet, which is more than enough to host OpenVPN, and then configure your VPN manually. Check here :

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

Or you can do it the easy way (but you won't learn as much) and run a bash script to configure everything automagically :

https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

I just tried that but on my VPS the 'tun' device was not enabled and the automagic script died. Seems that is not easy to fix on a VPS depending on your provider. Thanks for the tip though.

Not the OP and I don't use DO specifically, but I've found using a VPS provider to be a more or less painless VPN experience. Providers like DO, OVH, and Vultr have scripts for easy one-click OpenVPN setup, or you can roll your own if you don't trust their scripts (though if that's the case maybe you don't trust the VPS provider at all...)

That said, always verify that the tunnel is operating correctly before assuming it is and taking off. I've found on more than one instance that the OpenVPN client was misconfigured and seemed to connect, yet my IP was still being reported as my ISP's.

I did notice the Vultr OpenVPN deploy has license restrictions of two clients.

I think that's an OpenVPN restriction, not a Vultr specific restriction. You have to pay for a commercial license if you want multiple connections with OpenVPN.

It's a bit trickier (and more time consuming) to set up than I initially imagined but not at all undoable. A lot of tutorials are bit out of date or conflicting so it wasn't quite as easy as just following a recipe.

I didn't use DO but an even cheaper host and set up VPN at router using DD-WRT.

Occasionally I have to turn it off at router as certain sites/ services recognize the datacenter IP but not all that often.

Main reason I set it up is I use a small local ISP and know the owners and no need to have them watching net traffic.

The settings on both ends have to match perfectly. Don't forget to set DNS for openVPN also.

Unfortunatly, you lose access to certain sites, like Netflix, who block cloud IP ranges.

NordVPN works mostly reliably with Netflix.

Add to that many shopping sites (Best Buy for instance), deal sites, ticket buying sites, hotel/airline sites, heck, even my state's offender tracking system blocks the handful of VPS services I've tried.

You lose those with any VPN provider I've tried.

airVPN has this problem, unfortunately.

I have a device through which I netflix on which I do not do other personal browsing.

Quite a shame though, but nothing netflix can do about that. :-(

They could use billing address or something else to establish your location instead of your ip.

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