 Which VPN provider can we trust at this point? NordVPN failed to disclose their hack in a timely manner, TunnelBear, and then PIA got acquired by McAfee and Cape Technologies respectively, both companies with spotty histories with respect to user privacy. I mean, it's enough to raise the question, can't you just roll a VPN made by the one person you can definitely trust online? Yourself? The answer is yes, you definitely can. But whether or not you should Treat your eyes to long-lasting comfort and vision performance with a free trial of CooperVision Biofinity Energis Contact Lenses made for today's digital lifestyle. They're at the link below. The first question you need to ask yourself is, what do I need a VPN for? We figure there are roughly four main uses for a VPN, at least for now. The first is to secure and encrypt your traffic against prying eyes, like your internet service provider or bad actors on an unsecured Wi-Fi. Like, say that guy with his hood up in your local coffee shop. I'm not saying he's a bad guy, I'm just saying you might want to use your credit card for his Netflix subscription, aight? Which brings us to reason number two, accessing region-locked content like BBC or Netflix by masking your IP address and making it appear as though you are accessing it from a different country. And, well, I'm gonna have to stop you right there, because Netflix specifically aggressively blocks any connection coming from a server, VPN, or data center-related IP address. So your DIY VPN isn't going to work for this, unless, of course, a US-based friend agrees to host a VPN for you at their house, giving you access to their network. Which happens to be use case number three, using a VPN to access a remote, secure network. Let's say you've got a home server, and you want to be able to access your files or whatever without opening up an SSH server to the entire internet. Using a VPN server inside your network's firewall lets you tunnel into your network remotely via an encrypted connection, giving you access to all of the devices on your network as if you were sitting right next to them from anywhere. So if you fall under any of the first three, feel free to skip ahead to the tutorial portion of this video where we show you how you can set up a VPN server by yourself on cheap cloud hosting, out of friends, or at home for remote access. Number four is using a VPN to mask your IP for torrenting totally legal stuff, like Linux ISOs. This guy is purely for educational purposes, so you cannot be taken as a listener. No way composing or endorsing piracy, whatever you decide to do with this stuff is entirely your responsibility. Real talk, though. Many avid torrenters use VPNs to avoid DMCA notices and potential service throttling. That's why the data encryption that a VPN provides is so important for these use cases. If your ISP knows what your traffic is, they can easily come after you for downloading and sharing copyrighted content. Shoulda worn a stealthy hoodie from lttstore.com, bud! But seriously, unfortunately for you DIY VPN folks out there, if you're trying to run your VPN off of a rented server from a large hosting provider, any abuse reports from your totally legal torrents will simply be forwarded along to you if the account is in your name. Now you could get around the in-your-name bit by using fake information, but we obviously can't endorse fraud, and that doesn't help anyway if your provider just throttles your connection or suspends your account for accessing pirated content. Excuse me, uh, Linux ISOs. So the only way to combat this is to set up your VPN on a virtual machine from a company that's in a country that doesn't abide by the DMCA. That way, any takedowns they receive will just be routed to the trash. Now we're not gonna mention any specific providers, but if you Google DMCA-ignored countries, I'm sure that you can find one that suits your needs. Once you've selected a provider that works for your use case, we can move on to selecting a VPS tier. At a bare minimum, you're gonna want at least one core, half a gigabyte of RAM, and enough bandwidth for your application. For our example, we're gonna be using the lowest tier IPv4-compatible plan from a cloud-hosting company called Vulture. At just $3.50 a month, it's quite competitive with existing public VPN providers if all you're looking to do is hide your casual web browsing from your ISP and Wi-Fi snoops. Tutorial time, then. If you intend to follow along, we've got a step-by-step text version of this at the LTD forum, which is linked in the video description, including commands that you can directly copy-paste into your terminal. For the video portion, we're gonna assume that you've already booted up your CentOS VPS as per the tutorial, set up the firewall, and that you are SSH'd in, ready to go. The next thing we need to do is install VPN server software. There are lots of options here, but one of the easiest that we found is an open-source project called pre-tunnel. They've nicely laid out the exact commands that you'll need to get their VPN software installed and working. So copy over and run each command individually to add the required repositories and their GPG keys. These ensure that the software that we receive has not been tampered with. Then install pre-tunnel and MongoDB, start them, and set them to run when your VPS boots. At this point, you should be able to access your pre-tunnel web interface remotely by entering first, HTTPS colon slash slash, then the IP of your VM. If you cannot access it, you likely didn't configure your VPS firewall correctly, so make sure you double-check that. Once you've successfully accessed the panel, use the supplied command to get the setup key, click enter, and then use the other command to get the default user and password. Log in, and you'll be prompted to do some initial setup. We recommend changing the default username to make it harder to brute force, and you can also specify a custom domain here if you don't fancy typing in the IP all the time. Next, create an organization. This is basically just a user group and helps keep things, well, organized. Following that, create a user while being sure to specify a secure PIN. With your user in your org setup, head over to the server page and create your VPN server. You're gonna wanna leave most of the settings here on their defaults, except for the port that you previously specified in the firewall, and you might wanna disable inter-client communication and enable multiple device support. After linking your organization to the server, you can go back to the user page and download the pre-tunneled client straight off of the panel along with your VPN profile. Now you connect, and bam! You've got a shiny new IP address with all of your data encrypted along the way. Even with our test server located in New York, which is almost 3,000 miles away from our office, our latency was obviously worse, but we were still able to get speeds of more than 150 megabits at just $3.50 a month, offering us a near line-level experience. It's perfect for shopping on public Wi-Fi or watching online content without interruptions and without anyone snooping on what you're doing, except maybe advertisers. But if you watch our other video on Piehole, an open source network-wide ad blocker, you can actually fix that problem too. Maybe go check that one out right now. Speaking of checking things out, check out our sponsor, Brilliant. Thank you, Brilliant, for sponsoring today's video. 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