I bet that works. Based on advice in an older HN thread about VPSes, I looked on lowendbox.com and found a Chicago VPS provider for $20/year for a 128M/5G VPS with 200GB/mo. of bandwidth. It seems to run OpenVPN just fine for when I've wanted to use it; I'm just using it when I'm on untrusted wifi, or to route around a network block.

I installed TunnelBlick on my mac to be the VPN client; it was a nice interface to setup for the client side, and handles things like DNS flushing automatically.

I'm also going to setup ssh servers on 80 and 443 for times when access to ports is restricted by the wifi provider.