How to set up your own VPN in Windows for only $5 a month (2018)
Setting up your own VPN (Virtual Private Network) is relatively easy.
Things you need:
a. VPS
b. Filezilla (SFTP client) — free
c. OpenVPN client — free
Follow these steps and you’ll have your own VPN in twenty minutes tops.
Please note that this only applicable for Windows 7, 8, and 10.
Virtual Private Server
1. First, you need to get a Virtual Private Server or VPS. The location of the VPS is important when choosing one.
For this tutorial, we will be getting a VPS from Vultr.
Why?
They have (as of this posting) 15 locations around the world to choose from:
Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Sydney, and London.
And with generous bandwidth allocation to boot (1 Terabyte) for only US$5 a month.
You can go and sign up for Vultr by clicking here.
Go ahead and sign up first and go back to this page to continue.
2. After signing up and entering your personal and payment details. You will then be on your Servers list page.
Click on the blue plus button at the upper right side of your screen to create your first server.
3. Now on to server location…
To get good speeds, you must pick a location that’s closest to you. So if you’re somewhere in Europe, you should choose among Amsterdam, Paris, or Frankfurt for example.
But there are also instances where proximity is not important. You might want a VPN in the US (even though you’re in Asia) to avail of streaming services like Hulu or Netflix.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I will be selecting Los Angeles, United States.
4. In Server Type, select Debian 8 x64.
5. In Server Size, select $5/mo
6. In Server hostname and label, just type vpnla or whatever you fancy.
7. Then click on the blue “Deploy Now” button at the lower right side.
8. Wait until the status of your server says that it is “Running.”
9. Click on Manage. If you don’t see the Manage link, click on the three dots (…) at the right of the Running status and choose Server Details.
10. Click on View Console at the upper right
11. A pop-up window will open that looks like this.
12. Type in root as the login and press the Enter key on your keyboard.
Now we need the password. Go back to the Server Information page and click on the eye icon to reveal your root password.
13. Now copy and carefully type in the revealed password on to the console popup window.
We’re used to seeing dots or asterisks when typing in passwords. That won’t be the case when typing them in the server console. You won’t see anything appear when you type your password. That’s normal.
Just press Enter after typing your password.
If everything is in order up to this point, you should see this…
14. Now type this command in the popup window
wget https://git.io/vpn -O openvpn-install.sh && bash openvpn-install.sh
and press Enter.
If for some reason you get an error when trying to execute the command above. Try this:
wget git.io/vpn --no-check-certificate -O openvpn-install.sh; bash openvpn-install.sh15. Watch the gif below for a walkthrough on the next steps.
You can just press Enter at each prompt except for the last one where it is recommended to type in a custom name for your VPN.
After typing in the client name and pressing Enter. The script will now install the VPN on your VPS.
Take a break for a little while.
You will know that it’s done when you see this.
Filezilla
16. We need to download the OpenVPN configuration file created by our VPS.
For this we will install Filezilla, an open source FTP application.
Click here to go to Filezilla’s download page.
After downloading, go ahead and install it.
17. Open Filezilla
Just copy the details from the Server Information page and paste it on Filezilla. Type in 22 on Port.
Then click on the Quickconnect button.
Since this is your first time to connect to the server, this will appear…
Click on the checkbox and click on OK.
All the items at the left are folders and files in your PC while the ones at the right are the files on your VPS.
And there’s our VPN configuration file (right side) that we created a while ago…
18. We will click and drag that to the left side to copy it to our PC.
Set aside that for now and proceed to the next step.
OpenVPN Client
19. You will now have to download and install the OpenVPN client for Windows.
Click here to go to the download page of OpenVPN.
Click on the download link of the Installer (for Windows 7 and later) as shown above.
Open and install the downloaded file (see gif below).
Open OpenVPN GUI.
Since it’s newly installed, you will see this notice.
Just click on OK.
Look for the OpenVPN tray icon at the right side of your taskbar
20. Right click on the OpenVPN GUI icon and click on Import file.
21. Find the configuration file that we downloaded in Step 18. Then click on Open.
22. You will then see this…
Testing the VPN
23. Now let’s connect to our brand new VPN server. Right click once again on the OpenVPN GUI tray icon. Click on Connect.
After a few seconds, the OpenVPN GUI tray icon will turn green which means you’ve successfully connected.
24. Let’s check our IP address by googling whatismyipaddress.
My IP address is now the same as the IP address of my server which means the VPN worked.
You can also add other servers from other locations in your Vultr’s Server list.
Say you want to make it appear that you’re in Australia. Just choose the AU location and repeat the same steps.
Right click on the GUI tray icon and connect to your AU VPN.
Thank you for reading. If this has helped you, please do share it with you friends.