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 - any suggestions for 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, we have 3 different VPN providers (2 mainstream 1 small player) across about a dozen devices they were all throttled to 250K. If you turned VPN off or split tunneled it went back to 100mb plus (I have a 1Gb connection).
When I asked on reddit for advice 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 the throttling - maybe they'd already put the throttle on for anything encrypted by that point ?
Edit to fix poor grammar
Edit 2 - thank you all so much for the rapid replies, I'm going with OVHCloud as the cheapest option at my desired spec, with Ionos as the fallback if I have any issues with it.
The list you guys gave was brilliant though, so many options. Really appreciated
Regarding VPN being slow, two possibilities here:
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.
ShadowSocks might be what you’re referring to. https://shadowsocks.org/
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
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 ?
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.
Thanks for the input. I do a lot of remote work over a VPN for work (Azure one I assume as they're an MS house, I've not checked), which they don't block, but they also only blocked the always on VPNs myself and the rest of the household had in place for that 12 hour window on a Sunday. It is currently working fine for the personal VPNs. I didn't think to test the work laptop given I'd tested 3 VPNs by that time, but I'll try next time
I guess then that they just block popular third-party VPN services. Still not sure why, though, if it's not mandated by law.
Nah we don't know that either way on the available facts.
I had one outage which started on a Sunday and ran about 10-12hrs, 3 commercial VPNs were throttled down to 250Kb, but if you turned off the VPN or split tunneled full expected speed was reached (100Mb +). It wasn't the VPN servers as disconnecting from wifi and going over 4G/5G worked normally.
The "outage" ended and hasn't happened again. On the monday at least 2 of the commerical VPNs plus my work VPN were all working fine at the expected speeds and have been since. So we don't know either way whether my work VPN was or was not affected as I didn't think to test it.
Hypothesis 1 - I was sinbinned for too much torrent d/loading on sat night with a lock down against the VPN addresses that would have come up as the top couple of sources of large data requests (because obviously the tunnel IP address is what the ISP sees)
Hypothesis 2 - they trialled blocking popular 3rd party VPN services as you suggest (but 1 of the 3 is very obscure and def not main stream) and I was just one of those caught in it
Hypothesis 3 - Packet inspection captured torrenting activity and throttling was done because of that.
Clearly 3 is the worst scenario, 1 & 2 are quite probable - the govt is currently trying to create legislation to control VPN usage and as the largest(?) ISP Virgin would be an obvious candidate to do some tests on, and their service is so shite their customers are used to it getting shitty for random reasons.