Using VPS as VPN Server

VPS – Virtual Private Server
VPN – Virtual Private Network

They are both totally not the same thing.

First, why on earth that anyone do ever need a VPN?

1. Anonymity – believe or not, every time you log in to the email, or browse to any ‘hot’ sites, remember that there is a big brother watching. You are not private at all. The ISP will be able to tell what are you doing online. To make things worst, just go and browse using public Wi-fi facility at KFC or your neighbor’s. Every single thing you type is readable in a plain text.

2. Different IP – sometimes your IP is banned for something, purposely or not. Or you might not be able to access Paypal or or you cannot enter some websites due to their policy. VPN can bypass this barring by providing you new fixed IP.

3. Cheap, low cost, networking setup – small businesses who would like to have a complete networking between branches, yes this is it!

.. and a lot more reasons why would anyone need it.

So in this experiment, I have setup a VPN using OpenVPN. It is free and quite easy for use. First I have installed the server software at my VPS. Create the keys and distribute it to the clients. Every clients must have the key to get connected to the VPN box. However I must tell you, that I just connect to this VPN using a single client and never test client-to-client connection. I tried to ping the server, even though I get connected to server and browse happily using the server’s IP, I did not manage to ping the server’s private IP. I think there must be something wrong with my installation and got nothing to do with Exabytes server.

The VPN is running, and it is still running for weeks already. I must say that the VPS is quite stable, and never reboots unnecessarily.

If you concern about the browsing speed via the VPN, this is my testing result:

I did not surprise me when the download speed get lowered a bit, but I was impressed to learn that my upload speed was doubled!

I will keep on monitoring this.