Self-Hosted vs. VPN Service
A VPN is pretty easy to spin up on your own. We have a tutorial on this. You only need a small VPS – even a 128MB is more than plenty. Obviously what you want is a lot of bandwidth.
But do you want to run your own VPN?
You do gain many of the benefits but there are drawbacks:
- The providers’ network may not be optimized for this kind of activity, or the experience may be uneven. The only way to know is to test.
- Sometimes a 128MB or 512MB VPS will not have enough bandwidth, forcing you to buy a more expensive plan just to add bandwidth.
- Since you’re always connecting to the same VPN endpoint, your privacy is reduced. Instead of coming from your home ISP, now you’re always appearing on the Internet as your VPN’s IP.
- There’s the usual security work, patching, VPS administration, etc.
VPN Services
An alternative is a VPN service. Some of the benefits of these services include:
- They’re cheap! Cheap VPN services abound and are competitive with self-hosted.
- They typically have many servers in each geography, which enhances privacy. One night you’re appearing from this Chicago IP and a few hours later from that Minneapolis IP, etc.
- If you travel, they likely have a VPN endpoint near you so no latency issues.
- They’re handling all the admin work- you just connect and enjoy.
Owner at LowEndBox
I'm Jon Biloh and I own LowEndBox and LowEndTalk. I've spent my nearly 20 year career in IT building companies and now I'm excited to focus on building and enhancing the LowEndBox and LowEndTalk platform.
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