Hi there,
What are the prons and cons having a self hosted VPN [e.g.: on a paid VPS on DigitalOcean/Linode/etc] vs paying for a VPN provider?
1 Like
The primary differences are:
whom you trust with your data, the VPN provider or the vps provider
Whom does the maintenance and configuration, you and the VPS provider or the VPN provider
Cost
Depending on specific companies there may be more differences involved but overall these are the core differences.
1 Like
There’s a big difference in anonymity on the web.
If you use a big paid VPN service, you will have the same IP address as a hundred other people and it will be hard to track you.
If you use a self hosted VPN, you will likely be the only one using it, and it would be easier to trace it back to you.
2 Likes
Paid VPNs: They’re very cheap, and you don’t have to maintain anything other than updates for the client. As @dpr said, there’s more obscurity when your traffic is mixed in with hundreds or thousands of other users’. Just choose a respected service that doesn’t keep logs.
Thanks for replays. Yes, probably I’ll jump to one and close my vps. “No logs” that can’t be audited so is just trust.
Some great info here: https://www.youtube.com/c/BraxMe/search?query=vpn
In particular…
Top 5 Reasons why Popular VPN’s are not the Best for 2019 - Flaws of NordVPN, PIA and others
It depends upon what you are trying to achieve. If you go with a vpn provider you have to trust them; if you do it yourself, you have to do the work and you lose anonymity through obscurity.
I have run my own vpn which I destroy every month and rebuild (it takes about 15 minutes) so my ip address changes every month (I just have to make sure that I don’t get an ip address that has recently marked as a spammer). My goal is to protect my personal information from commercial exploitation so I am comfortable having my own vpn.
2 Likes
My goal is privacy