Volunteering to Setup Free VPN for Private VPN Usage

But, I have tried the GCP marketplace OpenVPN. I suspect AWS will be very similar.

What I didn't like are :

- free version restricts you only to 2 concurrent sessions.

- you don't have full control over 'server.conf'. Which is super critical to customize the VPN to your needs ( more on the config file here - https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/blob/master/sample/sample... ).

- there is some hidden default configuration that is not really in your favor (to save cost for instance) - e.g default compute instance runs on g1-small, but you can change it during the installation time to smaller one if you want. But if you overlook, you would end up paying about $15/month instead of $0/month. When I see these types of catches, I loose interest in what they offer - because there may be other catches like this one that will come and bite you at a later stage.

I want to keep the VPN super simple, honest and transparent (by which I mean, you have complete control over the config file). I didn't see that with the Marketplace image, instead it is designed to help OpenVPN make more money.

I wanted to come back to share my AWS experience. In a nutshell, its even worse than what GCP Marketplace offers.

- Burried deep in the EULA details - the free version allows only 2 concurrent connections, just like the one on GCP. (here is the horrible EULA doc https://d7umqicpi7263.cloudfront.net/eula/product/fe8020db-5... )

- Experience of picking the type of product and launching is awful compared to GCP. Happy to share more details, but I definitely would say this is painful experience. GCP has done a much better job. I still honestly don't know whether I ended up subscribing to services that I don't really need/or will get billed. I just have to wait and see. (e.g had to create key value pair, security groups, I see a volume showing up in my EC2 dashboard, not sure if I am going to get billed for it! ). I don't work for either AWS or GCP, but honestly I feel GCP has done a much better job here. I don't like GCP marketplace OpenVPN also for the reasons I mentioned in my earlier post, but AWS is even worse.

- Here is their documentation for setting up and configuring OpenVPN through Marketplace - https://openvpn.net/vpn-server-resources/amazon-web-services... . I am honestly shocked that they did such a bad job for a so called "one-click" application. I honestly don't think this is even designed for personal. It's more like try-me bait before they ask you pay to have someone set it up for you.

For actual installation, there are some good blogs out there - e.g https://medium.com/teendevs/setting-up-an-openvpn-server-on-... & https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/openvpn.html.en . My plan is not to repeat that.

You will have to create your cloud account and give me the access to it for me to setup your VPN and then you'll revoke the permission for me. This will ensure that I never have access to your VPN server after I set it up. I do this to essentially give you peace of mind. I recommend creating one just for this to keep things separate from any other things you want to do with your cloud service provider.

There is really no catch here. You control what gets tracked or not tracked on your VPN server, what level of logging do you want, how many clients do you want to connect, where do you want your VPN server to run etc.,

Let me know if that clarifies your concern.