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

  • hbm@feddit.dkEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    Go to https://lowendbox.com/ and click “shop now” under “explore cheap hosting deals” to filter by country. I have Racknerd and Hosthatch (in SE/NL), both of which have been fine for my extremely limited needs.

  • Katherine 🪴@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    This is late but I switched to Hetzner and Domeneshop from AWS for VPS hosting and DNS and I’ve been quiet happy. I have a dedicated VPS with far more power for far less than I paid through AWS.

    Also using Hetzner’s storagebox as a Google Drive replacement.

  • Argyle13 @lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    I have had one at Strato (German, now part of Ionos), for several years. Not a single problem with them, and prices are quite good.

  • sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    Regarding VPN being slow, two possibilities here:

    1. They analyze internet packets, detect VPN connections and deliberately throttle them.
    2. They just slow down anything that is not a common protocol (not http, https, ftp, …) that would make other things like torrent or even ssh session to be also equally slow.

    If it is the first possibility, I know that OpenVPN with static key tend to be very difficult to detect if not impossible. Its also a bit faster but it has its cons that I encourage you to read about.

    If it is the second possibility then you need to disguise your VPN traffic as https. I know its doable but I am fuzzy on the details.

    • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafeOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?

      • [object Object]@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days 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.

        • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafeOPEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          Thanks for the input. I do a lot of remote work over a VPN for work (Azure one I assume as they’re an MS house, I’ve not checked), which they don’t block, but they also only blocked the always on VPNs myself and the rest of the household had in place for that 12 hour window on a Sunday. It is currently working fine for the personal VPNs. I didn’t think to test the work laptop given I’d tested 3 VPNs by that time, but I’ll try next time

          • [object Object]@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            5 hours ago

            I guess then that they just block popular third-party VPN services. Still not sure why, though, if it’s not mandated by law.

            • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafeOPEnglish
              1·
              4 hours ago

              Nah we don’t know that either way on the available facts.

              I had one outage which started on a Sunday and ran about 10-12hrs, 3 commercial VPNs were throttled down to 250Kb, but if you turned off the VPN or split tunneled full expected speed was reached (100Mb +). It wasn’t the VPN servers as disconnecting from wifi and going over 4G/5G worked normally.

              The “outage” ended and hasn’t happened again. On the monday at least 2 of the commerical VPNs plus my work VPN were all working fine at the expected speeds and have been since. So we don’t know either way whether my work VPN was or was not affected as I didn’t think to test it.

              Hypothesis 1 - I was sinbinned for too much torrent d/loading on sat night with a lock down against the VPN addresses that would have come up as the top couple of sources of large data requests (because obviously the tunnel IP address is what the ISP sees)

              Hypothesis 2 - they trialled blocking popular 3rd party VPN services as you suggest (but 1 of the 3 is very obscure and def not main stream) and I was just one of those caught in it

              Hypothesis 3 - Packet inspection captured torrenting activity and throttling was done because of that.

              Clearly 3 is the worst scenario, 1 & 2 are quite probable - the govt is currently trying to create legislation to control VPN usage and as the largest(?) ISP Virgin would be an obvious candidate to do some tests on, and their service is so shite their customers are used to it getting shitty for random reasons.

  • Nick7903@feddit.dkEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    You gotta take a look at datalix.eu, they are actually the backend for a lot of small resellers and they got good hardware for the money.

    They always have a “sale” going on but they sometimes chance the hardware, i recommend waiting for the one with ddr4 ram it costs the same, also the “sale” VPS renews at sale price too also when the hardware on “sale” changes

  • doctor0710@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I’ve been very happy with Netcup too as a European VPS provider. They have a coupon until the 17th if you decide to go with them, I think it applies 7EUR off of a purchase above 7EUR: netcupSpring26

    As for throttling of the VPN traffic from the ISP side, that’s hard to say. Theoretically it’s possible they are doing deep packet inspection to specifically target VPN traffic, which would work through different ports, but I’d think that’s overkill. Maybe they’re doing it by protocol and just throttling UDP traffic, which would be easier, but I don’t know how to confirm that with mullvad.

  • warm@kbin.earth
    3·
    2 days ago

    My OVH experience was fucking awful, I wouldnt go anywhere near them. Big data collection scheme. Even the big 3 want less from you to spin up a machine or delete an account.

      • warm@kbin.earth
        4·
        2 days ago

        Asking for loads of personal information on sign up and then when I requested deletion, they requested even more. This was like 7 years ago, maybe they changed or got called out. Either way, I’ll never use them again.

        • DacoTaco@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          Data like what? Ive been using them for ages and besides email they dont have shit on me iirc :')

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafeOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, ok, fair enough. That probably answers all the questions…

        Virgin will be throttling, AND having internal problems 🙂

        Be interesting if your VPS hop also gets throttled…

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    31·
    3 hours ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    IP Internet Protocol
    TCP Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP
    UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications
    VPN Virtual Private Network
    VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

    6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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