VPN Not Needed
11 Oct 2021
I came across It’s Time to Stop Paying for a VPN on NYTimes and it piqued my interest. I went down a rabbit hole of research on the web to see if this was actually true and to learn more about if a VPN was really needed today.
Trust, but verify: An in-depth analysis of ExpressVPN's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week
How to Make Your Own VPN (And Why You Would Want to)
I finally went ahead and setup my own private VPN on DigitalOcean by following this video
I have it up and running and it works flawlessly. I am stopping my subscription to a VPN service and save around $40 a month. Here's why...
- Smaller VPN companies are getting bought by larger companies. Trust could be an issue.
- Majority of the websites are HTTPS now. The traffic is anyways encrypted between my device and the website.
- Apple in it's latest OS has enabled Private Relay.
When Private Relay is enabled, your requests are sent through two separate, secure internet relays. Your IP address is visible to your network provider and to the first relay, which is operated by Apple. Your DNS records are encrypted, so neither party can see the address of the website you’re trying to visit. The second relay, which is operated by a third-party content provider, generates a temporary IP address, decrypts the name of the website you requested and connects you to the site. All of this is done using the latest internet standards to maintain a high-performance browsing experience while protecting your privacy.
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I don't use public wifi. I prefer to share my cellular 4G bandwidth with any other devices.
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I used to pay for a private endpoint also (static OpenVPN server on AWS which helps tunnel traffic) from the VPN provider which would help me connect (from that IP only) to my web admin console. Now, setting up one on DigitalOcean was a breeze, less expensive and completely in my control.
So, currently all I use is the DigitalOcean private VPN server to connect to my web admin consoles. Let's see how this turns out next few weeks!