Most VPN services are paid and opaque, requiring you to trust a third party with all your internet traffic. To understand how VPNs actually work and keep full control over my data, I decided to build my own VPN using OpenVPN and AWS. In this article, I’ll walk through the exact steps I used to set it up on AWS using OpenVPN Access Server. Who This Guide Is For This guide is intended for: Beginners to intermediate users who want to build a personal VPN Readers with basic AWS and EC2 knowledge (no deep networking required) Anyone looking for a simple OpenVPN setup using the AWS Marketplace , rather than installing and configuring OpenVPN manually If you’re comfortable launching an EC2 instance and following step-by-step instructions, this guide should be easy to follow. What You’ll Need Before getting started, make sure you have the following: An AWS account with access to EC2 OpenVPN Access Server from the AWS Marketplace Basic familiarity with...