An upcoming travel opportunity had me searching for a VPN service I could use whiles away from 127.0.0.1 . This search lead me to Outline. A free vpn tool tailored for journalist - Touted as granting you access to the “internet you can trust” , as having “strong privacy and security”.
What led me to choose Outline over the rest, was the fact that you could run this vpn tool on your own server or a VPS of your choice.
The three things you would need to get started:
- A VPS of your choice eg. Vultr, AWS, Google Platform, Digital Ocean etc
- The Outline Manger
- The Outline Client
- Spin up a linux based server on your VPS
- Login to your server, ssh credentials should be available to you.
- Follow the prompts on the Outline Manager to setup the server.
- Download the Outline Client and add a server by copying and pasting an access key made available via the Outline Manager
And just like that you have a VPN connection setup. Your conversations, transactions etc etc are all free from prying eyes.
Another thing I like is that, I can just destroy my server and spin up another one and a completely new VPN connection anytime I want.