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

  • sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    4 hours 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.