I live in a Western country, but I still have many friends and family in my home country, where internet access is heavily censored. Even for basic communication like WhatsApp, they have to rely on paid VPN services that are often unreliable.
I’ve decided to set up a VPN on my personal computer so my friends and family can connect to it. However, I’m not sure where to begin. I tried SoftEther, but I couldn’t figure out how they could connect to it using an Android or iOS device. I’ve spent at least three hours searching online and watching videos, but I haven’t found a simple solution. I also tried using OpenVPN, but it only appears as an icon in my system tray, and I don’t know what to do next.
Please help me set this up so I can provide several people with access to the free internet.
If you are comfortable running Docker, I can’t recommend wg-easy enough. It takes so little time to set up that it feels too good to be true.
Set up docker (if you haven’t), pull and run the container (using the guide above), forward your ports, and you’ll be pretty much done. It’s a little more involved than that, of course, but it’s relatively simple and it has a web interface for management as well as desktop and mobile apps for the clients.
Once you’ve got it set up, they can toggle it the way you’d toggle any other VPN and it will tunnel to your host device and they’ll be rockin and rollin.
You could check out any number of people who do tutorials on it - they are all over YouTube and the setup is so simple that you kind of can’t go wrong.
Softether supports its own VPN protocol and can also works as VPN server that handles clients using: OpenVPN, Microsoft Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP), SSL VPN, EtherIP, L2TPv3, and IPsec. I use Spftether’s OpenVPN server without issues to my Android phones with a free OpenVPN client. IOS also supports OpenVPN as a client, and it also works with L2TP/IPsec. Softether is probably the best multi-protocol VPN server available, but it does have a learning curve.
Tailscale is sooo easy to use, iOS and Android apps are good enough. That is what I use for my self hosted devices, you have the exit node option directly on the app so your family could use your internet as an exit point.
Docker is incredibly important for self-hosting many things. It’s not required, but it simplifies and streamlines a lot of things.
Think of it like a tupperware in your fridge that contains ingredients to a dish. It takes up space and resources, but it is entirely independent of the rest. Similarly, Docker runs software independently of the rest of your system, which makes it very straightforward and, for the most part, painless.
It’s not required for most things, but it is highly recommended. Even if your only goal is to host a VPN for international users, you will benefit from learning to do it through Docker.
Docker is incredibly well documented, which is the good news. There are videos and guides all over the place to break down the process. The bad news is that nobody is really going to want to hold your hand and explain every aspect of the process to you because such documentation exists. You are in need of guidance but it’s posted all over the internet.
Half of self-hosting is self… you’re gonna need to get your hands dirty. There are 10 to 15 minute video guides on everything you will need to do. You can use AI to help you and answer questions along the way.
I started using Softether around 2014, on a local Linux box. I now have it on multiple cloud servers, all running Linux. I have only used Windows as a client, but reading the Softether forum, I see it is well supported as a server.
The instructions I used for my first setup was from here:
