New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Budget VPS/Dedicated Server For Public VPNs
LET_mejoin
Member
in Requests
Is it realistic to find a cheap VPS/dedi provider that'll allow me to host a public VPN service like vpnbook.com?
Comments
Yes. There are still providers that honor the S and P of the abbreviation "ISP". (they provide service, the rest is none of their business)
Just make sure that the laws in your country exempt you from liability as a service provider as well.
Maybe you can ask blazingfast.io (NL and maybe ukraine) and @cociu (Romania) from hostsolutions.ro i think.
Will you at least block port 25/SMTPS? Any ISP, no matter where and how expensive, will kick you if you simply allow the public to emit spam 24/7 with your box.
When you talked about public, did you talk about free or paid? If it is paid, there is no problem. If it is free, probably it raises concern.
Free or paid shouldnt matter so long as you can handle abuse properly. A DC would rather you give free VPN with no abuse than paid VPN with abuse.
With that in mind, there is still risk and the 'cheap' servers may not be available. In HK, I normally consider a budget under US$300 /m to be unrealistic since bandwidth cost so much.
It does - Free has no payment info to give to authorities (lets face it, all VPN providers have some sort of logging, else they would be out of business pretty quickly).
@William, I mean for the DC it doesn't matter much.
PIA claims to not keep logs. Sure they might keep records of you being a customer but not specifics on what you did on the servers.
you could do with us, just deal with abuses,
They 100% keep a Customer:IP log, but not content of the VPN connection itself - Again, if you don't have that the Gov will fuck you over hard.
I don't aim to provide a service for users that care about logging or SMTP ports. I want to cater to users who simply want to access blocked websites.
So i'll be blocking SMTP ports, allow P2P only if provider ignores DMCA and logg details for 48 hours-7 days to deal with abuse.
TBH for first few months i dont expect more than a dozen users (since SERP are dominated by sites like VPNBook that offer similar service and have multiple locations) so i don't want to shell out on an expensive server.
TLDR; If there are any providers reading this, yes i will deal with abuse. If you have something i can use please PM or post here.
@LET_mejoin,
What is your budget and hardware/bandwidth requirements?
If you want a server in the USA your budget will be inline with most providers. Hope this helps
Bare minimum specs:
You sure with this? I'm pretty sure 500GB will just enough for a week or two for public VPN
This. A few users and the bandwidth will be gone.
Users are in third world countries with slow connections. 500GB is bare minimum and i'll scaleup as required.
@LET_mejoin, any location preferences?
US/NL/Germany/Romania in this order.
@cociu How do you feel about letting me host public VPN on VPS you offer? SMTP port will be blocked and i'll deal with abusers.
@LET_mejoin, How about Lithuania? Port 25 pre-blocked
if you control your users ...
@randvegeta
Sure, please PM me link to packages.
I ran a free VPN service which never really took off (but it was a lot of fun setting it up). I think the max one of the two VPNs used was ~400GB. I just used some really cheap boxes from 123systems.net & TragicServers.net which price matched the super cheap deal from 123systems. Just check with the providers before ordering. Ramnode was also willing to allow this when I checked with them (in Jan 2014 so check again!).