Surely you’ve heard about the services of Amazon EC2, Rackspace and the like. Maybe you have even used some. Personally, I sometimes need a personal VPN server. For these purposes, I have long held a micro-instance on Amazon, provided by them during the first year free of charge. Plus, I used Amazon Glacier for archives, which can also be considered almost free with its price of “1 cent per gigabyte per month”. But the year is over and EC2 has to be paid. My archives also grew pretty well and the costs for Glacier likewise ceased to please.
I was very wrong. Below you will learn on how to set up a cloud VPN server on the basis of DigitalOcean.
Setting up Cloud VPN:
There are dozens of instructions on how to set a cloud Linux VPN server on the Internet. The script is guaranteed to work on an image of Ubuntu 12.04 x64 Server which is given by DigitalOcean. Installing and Configuring a VPN Server. Just run it, it will ask for the login / password for the VPN user and it’s ready.
You can set this all at the cheapest instance of DigitalOcean (for $ 5 per month), one active VPN connection will load the processor by 4-6% and leave 60% of the virtual RAM free. We already see savings, because even a micro-instance on Amazon costs about $ 15 a month, and here you have only $ 5. But that’s not all.
If you do not need a VPN server that works 24 hours a day (I use it a couple of times a week for a couple of hours), then you can turn off the virtual machine. At this point the attentive reader will exclaim “Aha! The author of the article is a fool, and does not know that DigitalOcean takes money even for the virtual machine that’s turned off! ” No, I know it. But for the remote work, no, it does not take anything. Therefore, right after turning off our machine, take a snapshot from it, it will cost us about 4 cents and delete the virtual machine. Now we do not pay anything.
The beauty is that the VPN server does not contain any changing data and every time when we need a VPN, we just restore the snapshot and start a virtual machine. We do not need it anymore, we kill it. The most convenient way to do this is through the DigitalOcean API. It’s very easy to use and very fast to learn how to set it. You will spend no more than 5 minutes before you run your first VPN.