Hi there,

I'm completely new to Linux hosting and I hope to find some answers here. I want to rent a (root) linux server to run a vpn service on it. I want to allow people to use this vpn.

My questions are as follows:

- What kind of server/service should I rent - dedicated or vps?
- Is one IP-Address enough to connect, say, 100 user? (I plan to run IPsec or OpenVPN, maybe PPTP)
- What Bandwith and/or traffic limits I need to consider to make the service reasonably fast for the users?
- Which Linux-distro should I use? Ubuntu Server, CentOS, FreeBSD, Debian etc?
- How much RAM and HDD space is recommended for such an endevour?
- Any advice on the processor type the server should have?
- Is 100M network ok or better 1000M?
- What means 100Mbps shared bandwidth in contrast to 10Mbps dedicated guaranteed per server?

Any further hints, links etc. are very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
LinuxMonk

For a service including VPN you would want dedicated really.

One is fine.

Depends what you are doing with it. I would guess you won't need anything "special " though

Whatever you prefer.

No idea as you've not said what it is for. The VPN itself won't be resource intensive at all. Nothing special I shouldn't imagine.

CPU would be part of the package with ram etc. Depends what you can affidavit and what you are doing wth it.

If you aren't shifting lots of internal data the network won't affect you.

With shared data someone else can affect your maximum speeds. Does that matter to you?

Another way could be m0n0nwall. It has PPTP and IPsec as server builtin. To use it as a plain VPN, you need a second network card for the internal LAN, although you don't need to connect anything to it, as all will be handled via the WAN interface (if this is what you want, i.e. connect from this VPN to somewhere else).

What else do you think is important to consider when renting a dedicated server? I'd like to offer secure VPN service.

I think most people will use the VPN for surfing the web or watching videos that they cannot access from their country. But the major traffic, I guess, will come from p2p. I don't plan to shift lots of internal data but I do want a mail server and a small web application running (includes a database) on the same server. I would prefer Ubuntu Server because I'm familiar with Ubuntu desktop already but if there is a good reason (like security, stability, speed, performance etc) I would rather choose another Linux distro.

I aim for speed. I guess 1~2Mbps dedicated bandwidth is rather slow for a vpn service, right? 10Mbps sounds better but is probably also not enough but maybe a good start. Do you think 1GB DDR2 RAM and 80GB HDD is enough for the server?

I can't see any problem with Hard disk capacity as the main consideration should be Bandwidth . you should really think about Ram and Bandwidth which is most important for speed and quality of your services