Using Amazon’s free tier to get your own FREE personal vpn server and connection.

I’ve written about personal vpn servers and the great things round strongvpn and other vpn providers to get around the ISP throttling problem of Netflix.  I always figured there was a better way to do it.

Well, after a bit of thought, I realized that one could easily use Amazon’s free tier (a micro-instance) for a year and only pay for the bandwidth to do it. That’s basically nearly free internet VPN service for a free year.

Well, after much testing and pain, I’ve created my very own OpenVPN micro-instance in the free tier and am now handling throttling free Netflix services.  Using Speedtest.net, I’ve managed to get 39 Mbps down and about 8 Mbps up.  This is very close to what my internet connection is.  (I have 50 down and 10 up, but I’ve reserved 2 Mbps for voice traffic.

To be honest, I only use my VPN connection for video-streaming and that’s about it.  Everything else goes through my WAN interface through Comcast. so I bypass the encryption and transport overhead of the VPN which is not needed in most cases.

I attached an Elastic IP to the micro-instance (which by the way is free) and I have the ability to have two way communication in and out of the server by IP in my dns as an A record rather than a CNAME (just my personal preference).

Since Amazon has graciously allowed us to have a year of free service, I pay very little to deal with Comcast.  I don’t have to use a VPN provider and worry about whether or not they’re blocking ports.  I also have complete control of my infrastructure.  As for bandwidth, there are very few companies that are as well connected as Amazon.

So what does this mean for me in the total scheme of things?  I get everything I want for far less than a VPN provider would provide.  Now don’t get me wrong, but if you do alot of traffic transfer, you’re going to want the service of a VPN provider, but for my needs, it’s more than adequate.

I normally would have set up an AMI on Amazon Devpay to handle the sale of my little pre-configured VPN appliance that by the way gives me complete and full control of the entire vpn infrastructure.

You get the first year free, then you just pay the reserved instance pricing and it works out to: 8.92 USD per month + bandwidth costs.  Let’s keep something in mind here.  The micro-instance is capable of handling 20-30 light to medium utilization users quite confortably.

So if you can find a few friends and everyone is willing to share in the cost of the reserved instance + bandwidth utilization (easily tracked per client), you’re not going to see a very big bill.  It works out to **literally** less than a dollar a month + transfer costs. Remember, Amazon doesn’t charge for incoming traffic.

So here’s my proposition.  I’ve enclosed an estore item called Amazon VPN server since Amazon’s devpay doesn’t allow me to sell micro-instances (and personally, I really don’t want to be bothered).

Buy my Amazon Estore VPN Server and I’ll set not only set it up for you, but I will share the AMI and configure your clients (up to 10).  Not a bad gig, huh?

It works completely excellent with High Def streaming and if it can handle my VPN connection, it’ll easily handle multiple other users as well.

If you decide to sign up for EC2 using  my link, I’ll give you my VPN server for free as a bonus and even help you set up your 10 clients.

Another Option:  Purchase my How-To-Setup Guide

Specify Your Donation: (Min. $5.00)
 [wp_eStore_buy_now:product_id:11:end]

The other option is to purchase my OpenVPN appliance and I’ll just give you access to my AMI.

Purchase my preconfigured Amazon OpenVPN server and get 10 free clients configured in the cost.  This includes setup and training.

 Amazon EC-2 Micro-Instance OpenVPN Server with config and training:  $49.99 [wp_eStore_buy_now:product_id:8:end]