Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinbartlett | Hacker News Reader

For $20 LESS per year than this "poor man's VPN", I can get an actual VPN that I don't have to maintain, has multiple world-wide POP's, and doesn't log customer usage: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

View on HN

True. However, the idea with this is that you probably have a spare low-end VPS that you can use for VPN also.

Exactly the point of the article.

You can get a low-end VPS for even less if you look at some VPS companies special offers, like $15/year for 1GB RAM, 20GB disk, 1TB transfer/month. Yes, low-end and most likely overbooked servers, but still decent enough for a proxy.

You don't need so much RAM for a VPN sever with a few users. You can get by with 128MB (or even less if you're ruthless), and get such servers for $7.50-$15.00 per year.

Check out: http://www.lowendstock.com/ http://www.lowendbox.com/ http://www.lowendtalk.com/categories/offers

wow, I never knew you could get a vps for that cheap, thanks.

Interesting article on that company http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-one-small-ame...

> and doesn't log customer usage

Come on. As always, naivete is dangerous: until you can't rely on anything but promises, whatever they say can't be trusted.

Does PrivateInternetAccess being located in the US have any impact on the security of their service? They are heavily promoted and that makes me skeptical of their motivations.

My understanding is that, in some ways, it gives them an advantage since many countries in the EU and elsewhere have mandatory data retention laws. The US does not.

They also go out of their way to accept anonymous payment sources, something most VPN providers don't bother with.

Yes, see Lavabit. The FBI can compel a US company to add a wiretap to their infrastructure.

That's why we built Lavaboom overseas and out of US jurisdiction. The same applies to many secure email providers.

After some research, I ended up going with IVPN (https://www.ivpn.net/). It's pretty affordable too.

What led you to decide on IVPN?

It's hard to truly compare, but I started from VPN review sites and just disqualified most of the sites that seemed to care more about torrenting than about privacy, and of the remaining ones I went with the one with the best reviews and official policies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com