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Comment by _23sd | Hacker News Reader

TorrentFreak maintains a list of providers that responded to a questionnaire about anonymity, including one about encryption used: https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-anonymous-review-160220/

Personally, I prefer the "roll your own" approach mentioned above. A VPS from DigitalOcean or something beats most providers' pricing.

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There is no anonymity if you roll your own.

The whole idea of VPN providers is that a lot of users have a connection to the same server so it's hard to monitor who talks to who.

Perhaps you're confusing VPNs with Tor. The latter seeks to provide anonymity; the former protects traffic traveling over a potentially untrustworthy network. Sure, a lot of folks seem to use VPNs lately as just a proxy to bypass geoblocking or whatever, and that works if the upstream endpoint is in the right place - but that's no reason to get confused about what the tool under discussion actually is able to do.

I am not confused there are just more cases.

A lot of people are using VPN providers to download illegal content via torrents. And in case there are no logs on the servers (which most providers advertise) the copyright holder has no way of knowing who you are since they only see that the traffic is coming and going from the providers IP address.

Those people are in for a series of nasty surprises if copyright enforcement ever grows teeth, because whoever's providing such a VPN service with backhaul certainly has enough information to tie them to their activity.

If they don't store logs they don't have enough information. That is the reason why a lot of companies that provide this service are incorporated in countries that don't require them to do so.

I can run a VPN service and not store logs. I can't prevent whoever sells me that service's bandwidth from storing logs, which they likely will do for troubleshooting purposes if nothing else.

You don't get anonymity with a VPN…

> A VPS from DigitalOcean or something beats most providers' pricing.

Does it? A VPN subscription costs around $40 a year, DigitalOcean starts from $60 a year for the lowest level standard droplet. Am I overlooking something?

You can get a VPS for far cheaper than DO's prices.

https://lowendbox.com/

http://lowendspirit.com/

I'm currently posting through a VPN running on a VPS I discovered through Low End Box, works just fine for browsing and downloading. 500GB transfer per month for $10 a year.

You could setup a free instance on AWS for 1 year then create a new account the following year.

How much can you trust these lowend box providers?

I talked to one guy who was utterly incompetent and another one who was really shady...

I trust them enough for my use case. Got one running as an OpenVPN server and another hosting a few small websites I've made for friends and family.

Would I trust them as a production server for an income generating app? Nope. But for my light/trivial uses they've been perfectly suitable.

providers have the advantage of offering multiple geographic locations without having to spin up a new instance every time you switch which may be useful to some people though.

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