Anecdote: You can do this really cheap on the billing side and use WHMCS for billing/member management. Better than rolling your own, and it's pretty extensible.
Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#12The fact that it is easy to set up a VPN does make this more competitive but that doesn’t mean you can’t build a business. Think about who your customers will be. Is there an underserved niche that you can reach? It might take a HN reader 10 minutes to set up a VPN but my mom wouldn’t be able to figure it out if you gave her 10 months. My battle plan for assessing whether or not I would pursued this would be the foll…
Adding an example of a niche: Those who wish to crawl Google/Bing/Amazon/Youtube results for SEO analysis around the world. You'd write a wrapper or other positive list of domains allowed through the proxy.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#13I'd be most worried about the legal liability, what happens if someone starts using your service to download or sell pirated movies or child porn? Whats your legal exposure?
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#14You're going into a heavily saturated market. Not to mention anyone technically savvy can set up their own VPN in 10 minutes on a cheap DO host or other provider.
I'd consider myself tech savvy and I happily pay for a VPN (PIA). I don't want to manage a node, and at $40/year it's about equal to what I'd pay otherwise.
I ran this script on a node 2 years ago and haven't had to touch it since, it's been a fully-working, reliable VPN for my whole family for $2.50/mo and 10min of my time for initial setup: https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#15most of the job will be technical support and finding the right server providers. marketing will be the limiting factor.
it's pretty quiet legally, usually it doesn't go further than DMCA cease & desists, but you need to mind countries and what logs each requires you to store.
see packetimpact.net maybe i can help you
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#16You're going into a heavily saturated market. Not to mention anyone technically savvy can set up their own VPN in 10 minutes on a cheap DO host or other provider.
I'd consider myself tech savvy and I happily pay for a VPN (PIA). I don't want to manage a node, and at $40/year it's about equal to what I'd pay otherwise.
I guess it takes an average HN reader 1 hour to setup a VPN. If the purpose is have a secured gateway for using public wifi, it serves the purpose. However, if you want to gain anonymity, it does not work since the node has a unique IP and only you are using this IP. You still need different users to use this VPN to gain anonymity.
Therefore, we could only choose one of the following: security or anonymity, but not both, unless you becomes your own VPN provider and serves some customers for anonymity.
An alternative is Tor, but a compromised exit node still leaks HTTP site.
So, if someone could solve this problem, it would be a big selling point. I am not sure if it is possible to share an IP between different VPN nodes without an untrusted gateway in front.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd consider myself tech savvy and I happily pay for a VPN (PIA). I don't want to manage a node, and at $40/year it's about equal to what I'd pay otherwise.
I ran this script on a node 2 years ago and haven't had to touch it since, it's been a fully-working, reliable VPN for my whole family for $2.50/mo and 10min of my time for initial setup: https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup
I've been looking for something like this, thank you. Do you mind sharing what type of hosting you use, and what kind of VPN traffic it supports?
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#18I'd be most worried about the legal liability, what happens if someone starts using your service to download or sell pirated movies or child porn? Whats your legal exposure?
Yeah this is my issue. I'm not too worried about it being a successful business (more like a small side project), but I don't have the resources to fight any legal claims.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran this script on a node 2 years ago and haven't had to touch it since, it's been a fully-working, reliable VPN for my whole family for $2.50/mo and 10min of my time for initial setup: https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup
I've been looking for something like this, thank you. Do you mind sharing what type of hosting you use, and what kind of VPN traffic it supports?
For $2.5, I guess it's Vultr.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran this script on a node 2 years ago and haven't had to touch it since, it's been a fully-working, reliable VPN for my whole family for $2.50/mo and 10min of my time for initial setup: https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup
I've been looking for something like this, thank you. Do you mind sharing what type of hosting you use, and what kind of VPN traffic it supports?
If you're interested in setting up your own VPN, take a look at streisand [0].
Also, running the VPN in a docker container is rather nice. There are a bunch of existing containers for that[1].
Oh, and if you're interested, Aruba Cloud [2] offers a 1 Core, 1GB ram VM in CZ and IT for 1 Euro/month. It comes with more than enough bandwidth for personal use.
[0]: https://github.com/hwdsl2/docker-ipsec-vpn-server
[1]: https://hub.docker.com/search/?isAutomated=0&isOfficial=0&pa...