VPN: Protect Yourself or Anonymity Online

We recommend installing a VPN.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) protects a user's privacy online. It's like a private lounge area, hidden from prying eyes.

A VPN provides a secure network connection over a private network over the Internet. Together withHTTPS connectionThis helps protect your personal data from theft. A VPN can help you hide your location or bypass regional and national restrictions. For example, if you're having trouble using the Telegram messenger and can't post to our public group,t.me/nicua_groupOur full team is available to promptly answer questions.

How does a VPN work?

When you connect to public Wi-Fi at airports or cafes without a VPN, imagine your data passing through a large tunnel along with other users' data. What does this mean? It can be intercepted by hackers. A VPN provides a "secret channel" within this shared tunnel. All data is encrypted so no one can read it. Once connected to a VPN, your actions are difficult to track. In this case, only the VPN provider and the website you're visiting can monitor your traffic. Now, to access a website, your device will first send an access request to the VPN server, which will then forward the request to the website. The data will then be sent to your device. The website will think that the VPN server is the user.

Benefits of VPN

1. Protects personal data from theft.
2. Hides your IP address and location.
3. Allows access to content that is not available in a particular country or region.
4. Provides a unified network environment for a corporation with offices located in different parts of the world.
5. Provides direct access to the corporate network to an employee who is not in the office.It's as if you've extended a network cable from your office to your home. All office resources (printers, coworkers' computers, file servers) become accessible.
6. Saves costs on separate dedicated lines for each user (employee).

Disadvantages of VPNs

1. Internet speeds may be lower when using a VPN provider than without it. This especially applies to free VPNs.
2. Technical problems with small and little-known VPN providers.
3. False anonymity. Remember that your VPN provider can track your online activity, even though no one openly admits it. Read license agreements carefully. Remember that your identity can be verified through bank cards or payment system wallets.

Get the most from the cloud on NIC.UA

We recommend installing OpenVPN on NIC.UA's own cloud.

1. First you need to select and payown cloud.
2. After this, in your personal account, in the "Cloud" section, you'll see the name of your cloud and a "Control Panel" button. This will allow you to manage your cloud server. You'll need to create a subscription and set up a virtual network. For more information on how to do this, read ourNIC.UA knowledge base.
3. At the virtual machine creation stage, you can choose the OS: Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS or Fedora.
4. WITHWe'll create a network rule to allow remote connection to the virtual machine via SSH. For more information, read our article.article.

Now you can use our ready-made script Install_openvpn.

1. Download and unzip the archive on the server.Install_openvpn.tar
2. Run the install_openvpn.sh file
3. Wait for the script to finish running

As a result, you'll receive OpenVPN installed and configured on your cloud, along with a configuration file for connecting to it as a client. You'll need to specify this file for your chosen client program.

How to install Open VPN on the NIC.UA cloud yourself

Below we'll explain how to set up an OpenVPN server to create an encrypted connection yourself.

Requirements. Server with OSUbuntu 16.04 (Debian, CentOS, or Fedora are optional)

Step 1. Installing the necessary software for OpenVPN to work.

Commands must be run as root. If you're running as a different user, use sudo. To install the server, update the repository and install the required software.

For Ubuntu and Debian:

apt-get update


apt-get install -y openvpn easy-rsa

For CentOS and Fedora:

yum update


yum install -y openvpn easy-rsa

Step 2. Configuring easy-rsa utility parameters.

For convenience, let's change the working directory to easy-rsa:

cd /usr/share/easy-rsa

Note:ChTo find out where easy-rsa is installed, use the command whereis easy-rsa

Let's change the KEY_NAME parameter in the vars file. Use any editor to do this, for example:nano (vi, mcedit):

mcedit vars

We find the line with the required parameter and convert it to the following format:

export KEY_NAME="server"

Note:Instead of manually editing the file, you can use the command:

sed -i 's/export KEY_NAME\=\.*\"/export KEY_NAME\=\"server\"/' vars