Running your own VPN
If you want a job done properly… We show you how to host your own VPN, at home or on a VPS, with OpenVPN or WireGuard.
If you think you can do better than some of these fly-bynight VPN providers, it’s fairly simple to set up your own VPN. You can do this on your home machine, so that when you are out and about, whatever networks you’re connecting over can only see that you are connecting to your ISP. Your ISP, of course, can see what you’re up to exactly as though you were working (or playing) from home. See the box (below) for guidance on how to host a remote VPN server.
Let’s start with a (very) basic overview of setting up an OpenVPN server. We won’t cover initial setup and securing of the box (be it real or virtual), otherwise we’d be here all day. OpenVPN is a hugely complex and You can add y powerful bit of software, but in its one-click (OK simplest configuration (with a single static key), it’s amazingly straightforward to fire up.
HOSTING YOUR OWN VPN
The most common way to run a VPN is using a cheap VPS (virtual private server). If you already have a server (virtual or actual), you can use that, but in the interests of security, it’s best to keep things separated. Cheap VPSes can be had from the likes of Digital Ocean or Mythic Beasts, and you can generally go for the lowest spec offered – a VPS doesn’t require much in the way of compute or memory. At least if it’s just for personal use.
Paranoid individuals might want to rent a VPS in a country outside of the Five Eyes alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US), since those countries will happily help each other spy on your server. Remember, the encryption is only between you and said server – anything after that is as vulnerable to snooping as if you were not using a VPN. Amazon Web Services (AWS) might well offer cheap Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances in diverse regions, but it’s still an American company and is unlikely to resist, say, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants from the US government. Not that you would be doing anything that would interest them, of course.