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

  • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    To disguise the traffic completely, you can use either aforementioned Shadowsocks or obfs4, which both make it look random and are used by Tor bridges to circumvent packet inspection and whatnot. obfs4 is a bit ass to setup standalone, because it was made specifically for Tor — you need a different piece of software to make it work like a proxy. Dunno about Shadowsocks.

    Regarding VPN blocking in general, I wonder how the UK or your provider deal with the fact that a lot of businesses use VPNs for their day-to-day operations. From quick googling, VPNs don’t seem to be banned nationwide, so it would be nice if you asked the sysadmin at your work to set up a VPN, see if your ISP blocks connections to it, and raise a stink if they do.