10
votes
Looking for a good, cheap VPS for a VPN in or around London
I watch Countdown every day. For the last year I've had a t2.micro for free from AWS. Its been pretty good, but my year is coming up. I am looking for the cheapest VPN possible, which is often having my own VPS.
Does anybody have any suggestions? Most are around $6, which isn't too bad, but I'd love to get something cheaper; either in a reliable lowend box or a proper provider.
Maybe not directly useful, but check out Algo and the hosts it supports. You can easily just set up and tear down that way and try any of them out as you like. Personally, I usually use DigitalOcean for things outside of my free box on Oracle.
I do not highly recommend Oracle because OCI is incredibly obnoxious to configure, but you can't beat their free-tier resources for ARM machines. They are also known for straight deleting free-tier accounts for no obvious reasons at seemingly random times.
oh nice. I normally use this for ovpn.
I've had an Oracle VPS for about a year. Its like there's a contest between them and AWS for most bloated panel. I signed up with them under San Jose at the time and tried to get them to switch me to London, but they [c,w]ouldn't do it.
I'm basically in the same boat as you, actually. I've also got a droplet in SF :) We should start a gang and get matching jackets.
What exactly do you mean by "around London"? If it's not UK only, Hetzner is about the cheapest VPS provider without sacrificing on uptime, performance etc. The closest server they have are in Germany IIRC though.
UK only, sadly.
I use Mullvad, and they have exit nodes in London and Manchester. I use it to watch the European coverage of cycling events on Discovery+. Their service costs $5/mo.
Google and Oracle also have free tier VPSs that might work.
https://github.com/cloudcommunity/Cloud-Free-Tier-Comparison?tab=readme-ov-file
sadly GC's freebie isn't in the UK and I already scooped Oracle for an American based VPS :(
Those were what I was going to recommend too. Bummer.
I currently use Tailscale with Mullvad add on. I really like tailscale for my server access. I wanted access to an exit node in France, and I considered getting a small vps like you, but the mullvad addon was only $5/month for worldwide exit nodes, and a server would be about that price anyway.
that's a pretty good option, really. All of this stuff is so cheap.
Are you able to just use a physical computer in your home?
that's all I ever use.