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Comment by apaprocki | Hacker News Reader

Worth mentioning a $5 cloud instance and installing Algo VPN on it gets you the same thing without having to trust a 3rd party VPN provider (only a generic VM provider such as AWS). It’s always worth minimizing companies you deal with if you already use AWS, GCP, etc.

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It is not. VPN Providers have server all over the world. How many cloud instances in the different part of the world you can buy with $5?

A lot of, a t3.micro is free, I guess Amazon know who you are and which IP you were using at a certain time though.

Also, public cloud machines come with IPs of well known ranges. It may be easy to spot them if required.

On the other side, this is the approach that I'm currently using, without any problem for my particular case.

AWS offers all the regions I’d care about, but I do concede many-exit scenarios are not what I was referring to. I’ve been more than satisfied with my personal use, but have never required that feature.

This is much worse than using Mullvad if you need a lot of locations, which it sounds like OP did. There are far more Mullvad exit nodes than AWS regions, and it takes mere seconds to flip between them. VPN providers have exit nodes in every major city, but there are only a handful of AWS regions.

I'm not sure what trust you need--HTTPS gives you the confidence that your connection hasn't been read or modified as it passed through the VPN provider, and frankly, I trust Mullvad more than I trust AWS.

Yes if you need many-exit, DIY is going to be more painful. I’ll disagree about the trust point, though. It’s about relationships. I want as few corporate relationships as possible. If I already deal with Amazon and AWS and I can get this additional service from them, I will gladly do it over starting a new corporate relationship (iff my trust is never violated, in which case I will then rehome everything).

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