Maybe if you're a black hat firing up a brand new computer from a cafe while you left your phone at home. For the rest of us that just want to, say, watch the US Presidential debates from another country going through our own VPS is far better than relying on some possibly skeezy third party VPN. Personally I use HideMyAss when I'm travelling to countries I don't trust or when I'm on wifi networks that I fear may be monitored, but I'd rather spin up a Digital Ocean box if setting up my own VPN were as easy.
> but I'd rather spin up a Digital Ocean box if setting up my own VPN were as easy.
I thought the same thing, until I found openvpn-installer [1]. You just need to run 1 command - the entire OpenVPN setup process takes 5 minutes. I used it on both Debian and CentOS and it works flawlessly.
At the end, you just grab the config file using rsync or SFTP, and load it into your OpenVPN client. Now I have a dedicated droplet for VPN use. Once a month I destroy it and create a new one, because I'm slightly paranoid :P
I also use Nyr's script to setup OpenVPN, which is also running on DigitalOcean.
I have read that DigitalOcean have a strong stance against torrenting though, so have only downloaded a few times through my VPS.
Was considering moving to AWS, but I'm not sure Amazon would be any happier, and I'd probably end up with a big bill at the end due to bandwidth usage!
Ah I see. Well a few years back I heard that OVH is one server provider that looks the other way when it comes to torrents, but I'm not sure if that's still the case.
Another option is to just get a seedbox. You basically get a server running a torrent client that you can access through a web UI. Once you download a torrent, you FTP it over to your machine. Many of these providers can give you amazing bandwidth .
Yet another option is to save yourself the effort and simply get a Usenet account ;)
when using a VPS you'd also have to trust the VPS-provider. There's no difference between trusting a VPN or VPS provider - both can see/log/monitor your traffic.
