How to Create a Personal VPN for Yourself for Free

medium.com

26 points·behnamoh··6 comments

Routing your traffic to a server controlled by a US company is more secure than…?

We should maybe define what we mean by secure before suggesting these things. Also, we should speak about setups like this more genetically, maybe focus on the software that enables this type of thing (OVPN) and not some big cloud provider in the US giving you a cheap VPS.

FWIW, thanks for the images and clear explanations for setup. I just think in todays world we should dissect these suggestions more deeply.

I'd say routing traffic to a country that doesn't protect freedom of speech is probably worse than routing it through the US.

More secure than a number of countries and at least as secure as anything in Europe, at least if you are a US citizen.

I’ve followed a few tutorials to set up personal VPNs, but ended up abandoning them soon later. The main reason is that I don’t know if they are secure or how to keep them secure, so using these instances has a potential security risk. Does any one know if there’s any tool that I can run periodically to make sure my VPN is secure ?

Your use case might be to route all traffic through an endpoint, in which case https://ipleak.net will tell you what your browser is giving away.

The other use case —- what this article is about —- is a persistent bridge between private subnets. In general, you can worry about this channel to the same degree that you worry about SSL. To test either, the network sniffer Wireshark is a good start.

An easier and cheaper alternative is using Hetzner with their Wireguard VPS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com