
Volunteering to Setup Free VPN for Private VPN Usage - amanj
I want to help setup private VPN for those who are looking for home VPN. I will set it up on your choice of cloud provider. If you go with GCP, you can have your VPN for free as long as the server is in US. (GCP offers free f1.micro in 3 regions).<p>I am just doing this as hobby.<p>VPN will be setup with your cloud account. So, once setup, I won&#x27;t have any access to your server.
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doorbellguy
Thanks for making this post. I'd love to have one setup but I'm still not sure
about this part:

>VPN will be setup with your cloud account. So, once setup, I won't have any
access to your server

Can you elaborate a bit? What's the catch, if there's any?

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amanj
What I mean by this is, VPN server itself will be setup on a cloud service
(say GCP, AWS etc.,).

You will have to create your cloud account and give me the access to it for me
to setup your VPN and then you'll revoke the permission for me. This will
ensure that I never have access to your VPN server after I set it up. I do
this to essentially give you peace of mind. I recommend creating one just for
this to keep things separate from any other things you want to do with your
cloud service provider.

There is really no catch here. You control what gets tracked or not tracked on
your VPN server, what level of logging do you want, how many clients do you
want to connect, where do you want your VPN server to run etc.,

Let me know if that clarifies your concern.

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doorbellguy
That explains pretty much any follow up questions I could have had. It's a
really nice offer from you.

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amanj
Thanks. For me it's easy to set it up. And I know that there is lot of people
out there, who would love to have peace of mind, but don't know how to do it
on their own.

I have helped setup now probably 20 - 30 people over the last 3 years. It's an
awesome feeling when I see that emotional satisfaction they draw, knowing that
their data is sent encrypted out of their devices.

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amanj
Let me know if you have any questions. If you want to pay for my service, I'd
suggest you contribute to one of your favorite charities/NGO. If you don't
have one, I suggest Wikipedia.

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ajroot
Could you write a blog post that would explain how you do it? This would be
really helpful.

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amanj
Yeah, absolutely. I am planning on doing it. Maybe by end of tomorrow. My
intent is to keep it simple, honest, transparent.

For actual installation, there are some good blogs out there - e.g
[https://medium.com/teendevs/setting-up-an-openvpn-server-
on-...](https://medium.com/teendevs/setting-up-an-openvpn-server-on-google-
compute-engine-9ff760d775d9) &
[https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/openvpn.html.en](https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/openvpn.html.en)
. My plan is not to repeat that.

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franzwong
For AWS, you just need to use AMI for OpenVPN and it is extreme easy to setup
in a few minutes.

~~~
amanj
Hey,

I wanted to come back to share my AWS experience. In a nutshell, its even
worse than what GCP Marketplace offers.

\- Burried deep in the EULA details - the free version allows only 2
concurrent connections, just like the one on GCP. (here is the horrible EULA
doc
[https://d7umqicpi7263.cloudfront.net/eula/product/fe8020db-5...](https://d7umqicpi7263.cloudfront.net/eula/product/fe8020db-5343-4c43-9e65-5ed4a825c931/39a4e067-e872-4a59-bcd8-b5e7a60d661e.txt)
)

\- Experience of picking the type of product and launching is awful compared
to GCP. Happy to share more details, but I definitely would say this is
painful experience. GCP has done a much better job. I still honestly don't
know whether I ended up subscribing to services that I don't really need/or
will get billed. I just have to wait and see. (e.g had to create key value
pair, security groups, I see a volume showing up in my EC2 dashboard, not sure
if I am going to get billed for it! ). I don't work for either AWS or GCP, but
honestly I feel GCP has done a much better job here. I don't like GCP
marketplace OpenVPN also for the reasons I mentioned in my earlier post, but
AWS is even worse.

\- Here is their documentation for setting up and configuring OpenVPN through
Marketplace - [https://openvpn.net/vpn-server-resources/amazon-web-
services...](https://openvpn.net/vpn-server-resources/amazon-web-services-
ec2-tiered-appliance-quick-start-guide/) . I am honestly shocked that they did
such a bad job for a so called "one-click" application. I honestly don't think
this is even designed for personal. It's more like try-me bait before they ask
you pay to have someone set it up for you.

