Hey all, I hope I’m on topic, I host a bunch of self hosted services at home, however with the way things are going in the UK I’m looking to get a VPS set up, initially to use as a proxy and wireguard pop, probably move more stuff to avoid censorship later on (use case is a little fuzzy just yet).
So, primary question is - any suggestions for good VPS providers that aren’t the big 3 tech bros, in Western Europe, preferably France, Netherlands Belgium or Spain ?
Secondary question, my ISP throttled all VPN traffic the other week, we have 3 different VPN providers (2 mainstream 1 small player) across about a dozen devices they were all throttled to 250K. If you turned VPN off or split tunneled it went back to 100mb plus (I have a 1Gb connection).
When I asked on reddit for advice the reddit bots immediately jumped in with “oh it’s just your VPN provider” however if I dropped phones off the wifi and connected to mobile telephony the VPN’d connections were fine - similar speed to split tunnel less some overhead. Lasted for 12 hours and then went back to normal. I assume I was being sin-binned for too much sailing of the seven seas.
Any idea what settings I can tweak to make it harder for them to throttle me ? I tried changing the Mullvad one to use port 443 but it didn’t affect the throttling - maybe they’d already put the throttle on for anything encrypted by that point ?
Edit to fix poor grammar
Edit 2 - thank you all so much for the rapid replies, I’m going with OVHCloud as the cheapest option at my desired spec, with Ionos as the fallback if I have any issues with it.
The list you guys gave was brilliant though, so many options. Really appreciated
VPN throttling: are you sure your DNS traffic’s going through the VPN tunnel and going to an external server, not your ISP’s?
If they can see where you’re browsing, maybe that’s triggered something.
If it was only for a few hours though, maybe they just had an internal problem?
Give them a call and ask them. And if they’re doing something weird (throttling traffic), they should be able to tell you why… and consider leaving them if they’re not providing the service you need.
Great questions.
I’m reasonably confident the DNS requests are not going to the ISP but I wouldn’t bet parts of my anatomy on it. The router is set to call Mullvad’s DNS with quad 9 as the fallback (which is obv for unencrypted traffic and the initial call to start a VPN session), the Mullvad client definitely calls to their dns and they have tests on their website for dns and rtc leaks which they pass.
The other two have similar setups, although the minor one I might just carefully check.
There is unfortunately only 1 ISP in my area (Virgin), and I would really love to not be using them - they have an awful reputation for a very good reason. Their support team is truly atrocious, and from previous experience I’ll get an answer like
“I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?” “Yes I appreciate that, but are you throttling my VPN ?” “I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?”
Continue loop until you hang up.