thanksforallthefish1d ago

VPS in Europe, not AWS/Google/M$

https://literature.cafe/post/30660967

VPS in Europe, not AWS/Google/M$ - literature.cafe

Hey all, I hope I’m on topic, I host a bunch of self hosted services at home, however with the way things are going in the UK I’m looking to get a VPS set up, initially to use as a proxy and wireguard pop, probably move more stuff to avoid censorship later on (use case is a little fuzzy just yet). So, primary question is - good VPS providers that aren’t the big 3 tech bros, in Western Europe, preferably France, Netherlands Belgium or Spain. Secondary question, my ISP throttled all VPN traffic the other week, 3 different VPN providers (2 mainstream 1 small player) across about a dozen devices throttle to 250K, turn it off or split tunnel and back to 100mb plus (I have a 1Gb connection). The reddit bots immediately jumped in with “oh it’s just your VPN provider” however if I dropped phones off the wifi and connected to mobile telephony the VPN’d connections were fine - similar speed to split tunnel less some overhead. Lasted for 12 hours and then went back to normal. I assume I was being sin-binned for too much sailing of the seven seas. Any idea what settings I can tweak to make it harder for them to throttle me ? I tried changing the Mullvad one to use port 443 but it didn’t affect it - maybe they’d already put the throttle on for anything encrypted by that point ?

Show threadsun_is_ra

Regarding VPN being slow, two possibilities here:

  • They analyze internet packets, detect VPN connections and deliberately throttle them.
  • They just slow down anything that is not a common protocol (not http, https, ftp, …) that would make other things like torrent or even ssh session to be also equally slow.

    • If it is the first possibility, I know that OpenVPN with static key tend to be very difficult to detect if not impossible. Its also a bit faster but it has its cons that I encourage you to read about.

    If it is the second possibility then you need to disguise your VPN traffic as https. I know its doable but I am fuzzy on the details.

    Apr 11 at 1:14pmWeb
    Show threadthanksforallthefish1d ago
    Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?
    Show threadSlurpingPus21h ago

    To disguise the traffic completely, you can use either aforementioned Shadowsocks or obfs4, which both make it look random and are used by Tor bridges to circumvent packet inspection and whatnot. obfs4 is a bit ass to setup standalone, because it was made specifically for Tor — you need a different piece of software to make it work like a proxy. Dunno about Shadowsocks.

    Regarding VPN blocking in general, I wonder how the UK or your provider deal with the fact that a lot of businesses use VPNs for their day-to-day operations. From quick googling, VPNs don’t seem to be banned nationwide, so it would be nice if you asked the sysadmin at your work to set up a VPN, see if your ISP blocks connections to it, and raise a stink if they do.

    Show threadeodur1d ago

    I haven’t investigated it much but AdGuard’s VPN masquerades as https traffic and might work for you. They recently open sourced it too:

    https://github.com/TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel

    GitHub - TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel: Modern, fast and obfuscated VPN protocol

    Modern, fast and obfuscated VPN protocol. Contribute to TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel development by creating an account on GitHub.

    GitHub
    Show threadthrillhouse1d ago
    ShadowSocks might be what you’re referring to. shadowsocks.org
    Shadowsocks | A fast tunnel proxy that helps you bypass firewalls.

    A fast tunnel proxy that helps you bypass firewalls.