As long as the Turkish government continues their internet censorship, I will continue to find ways to bypass them. They've blocked countless of sites this year and in the past, like Wikipedia, YouTube, Roblox, Wattpad, Discord and so much on.
I've used commercial VPNs in the past, like those free VPNs in the App Store, Cloudflare WARP Tunnelbear, Proton VPN, and most recently, Mullvad.
I've used them to mostly bypass the geo-blocks, internet censorship. But in the last few months I've moved on to privacy-focused services like Proton and Mullvad. But, all VPN providers had a disadvantage: They would be blocked after a few weeks. That's why I started to self-host my whole VPN network.
Our first server started with a VPS, located in Istanbul. Hosting services have unblocked and uncensored access to the whole internet, so this was the cheapest and the most reliable option for me, around 2-3 USD per month. But the location was still Turkey, so I couldn't bypass the geo-blocks enforced by the site owners.
The first few weeks, I used the Wireguard protocol to communicate with the VPS, but after my ISP throttled the Wireguard protocol, I migrated to OpenVPN with HTTP proxy, which would allow me to use the VPN without my connection being throtthled by my ISP.
Then I met with Google Cloud, which gave me access to servers everywhere in the Google datacenter network. I opened up my account with 300USD in credits, and I still continue to use them.
I've set up 3 more locations with OpenVPN. They are located in:
- Iowa
- Zurich
- Melbourne
which was enough to cover my needs of bypassing the internet censorship.
To connect to my VPN servers, I use the Viscosity app on my Macbook and the official Android app for OpenVPN.
Thank you for reading!