I am moving out of my current location and transferring to another country. I was thinking of leaving one FWP here at a relative’s house primarily so that I can access it as a VPN server in order for me to access local websites such as banks, financial institutions, sports streaming etc. But that would mean I will have to buy another FW for my home in my destination. Alternative is getting a dedicated IP from one of the more popular VPN services.
I am curious what people here would suggest is better. It seems sites are getting smarter now in detecting VPNs and kicking out VPN users. Will my experience be any better using the FWP VPN server? Does it look more “innocent” (i.e. just another house in the country) than a dedicated IP from the big VPN services?
The firewalla purple is capable of running both server and client configuration. But for VPN server I would prefer gold specifically due to hardware limitations that may arise.
There is a big difference in running a connection to commercial VPN server to a firewalla VPN server.
Generally big streaming and hosting services have started to identify common commercial VPN server with dynamic addressing resulting in failure in hosting services being delivered. This problem is solved with static IP in commercial VPN service but comes at a premium. More over many commercial dynamic ip address VPN server has issue of misused of ip address for nefarious purpose resulting it getting tagged in blacklist pool. Which will give you further headache.
But all these problem are addressed in Firewalla as you are on your own dedicated connection to existing home dynamic address which is not going to be misused in a session.
Of course a residential IP can allow better access, but in most cases there is not much difference from a commencial VPN IP except for like video streaming.
No specs are very different and hardware of gold is not comparable with purple. The choice of the Hw is driven by usecase you are planning. You may want to go to their website and check the detailed difference of both hardware.
With premium commercial VPN i had run into difficulty with Disney as it didn’t want to stream at all. That is my experience yours might be very different.
Running VPN at home is always better than a 3rd party VPN. There are many services, such as banks, and shopping sites, that deal with VPN service negatively.
I have done, exactly what you’re describing. It works flawlessly.
Some apps seem to detect if a VPN is running on your device, but applying the VPN from your away firewallas works great to bypass that.
Unless whatever service you have is super sensitive to ‘hey you were just across the world 2 minutes ago, how are you here now?’, you’ll be fine. At least I’ve been fine with this setup, pivpn before firewallas and edge router site to site before that, for going on 8 years now.
Thanks! Premium for a dedicated IP is not as much compared to buying a new firewalla though so I was wondering if the difference is worth it.
What would be the difference of the FWP and Gold regarding VPN server capabilities( assuming it’s not the lemon purples)? I thought the specs were the same in this regard.
For WPN both the Gold and Purple both offer 500mbps for Wireguard VPN server. I don’t see any other difference in this respect. I don’t really care much for the others features as I won’t be using them in this setup.
Thanks for the info! That is great to hear. My worry is that since I am planning to set it up at a non-techie relative’s place. Using the FWP, the internet or VPN would sometimes stop working and I have had to tinker with it, power cycle it, reset it every 3-4 months or so. It would be hard to do half way across the world.
Recently got a replacement FWP due to the upload issues. I wonder if this will solve the issue and I can leave it peacefully at their place.