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Comment by ikeyany | Hacker News Reader

1) PIA is less than $35 a year

2) PIA takes less than a minute to setup on every device. Download the app, login, and you pretty much never have to worry about it again.

Your alternative is more expensive, more resource-hungry, and more of a pain in the ass.

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Also as someone who has a couple of Raspberry Pis in his house, memory card corruption is real and it’s annoying as hell. If I wanted an OpenVPN gateway I would not want to run it on Raspbian. Maybe on a distro that runs purely in memory after boot.

But like the other person said, if you value your time it is almost certainly not worth spending time on setting this up yourself, even if memory card corruption was not an issue.

I am also super hesitant to rely on a raspberry pi for anything that should really work, networking related, considering that the ethernet interface is actually a USB 2.0 device hung off a very cheap USB bus. It's not like having an Intel or Broadcom PCI-Express interface NIC on the motherboard of an x86-64 platform PC. It also has only one NIC. All of the methods to get >1 NIC on a raspberry pi use additional USB devices and are ugly hacks IMHO.

If you are experiencing corruption issues you are likely using a USB power supply that is not sufficent, for the rpi3 you need at least a 2.5 amp supply to ensure reliability.

... and values your time next to nil.

One major benefit to running your own is that a non-zero number of PIA's IPs are blocked on many sites. A random VPS IP is much less likely to be.

I ran into that at times, but it's so infrequent, I don't consider it a drawback.

Please make sure to report that to PIA support, they do have some solutions available. Worst case, it gives them evidence that it's time to rotate IPs.

> a non-zero number of PIA's IPs are blocked on many sites

The Swiss and Norwegian servers are blocked on almost no sites.

I've actually found the opposite to be true. Sites seem to focus more on preventing scraping and block VPS IP's more often than commercial VPN. For example, Craigslist on Digital Oceans IP's is hilariously throttled to ~256 bytes per second. Crunchbase always tosses up a CAPTCHA. This was mostly the same for Linode.

Ironically, 256 bytes per second is probably still enough to make Craigslist usable... Web design right out of the 1200 baud modem era :-)

They've zapped some of my AWS subnets but not others. It doesn't appear to be a dynamically updated blacklist.

Craigslist blocks PIA. I find the utility steadily decreasing as more and more sites block their addresses.

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