In today’s digital world, privacy, security, and performance are of utmost importance. Many individuals and businesses rely on two popular services for these needs: VPS (Virtual Private Server) and VPN (Virtual Private Network).
In this article, we will go over step-by-step instructions on how to install OpenVPN on an Ubuntu 18.04 VPS.
A Virtual Private Network or VPN for short is a networking service that routes your network traffic through a server. With this, all of your network connections will be disguised as though they originate from the VPN server’s connection. The destination address can’t know your real location, thus providing both privacy and safety online. VPNs are also used by corporations and enterprise environments to enable a secure private network to protect their important data.
OpenVPN is a VPN protocol which defines how the data is transmitted over a VPN. Other common protocols are PTP, L2TP, SSTP, and IKEV2.
OpenVPN provides the most secure connection among other protocols as it provides secure authentication (such as the use of certificates and keys) as well as using up-to-date encryption algorithms. On top of this, OpenVPN is open-source software powered by thousands of developers from different communities. It is distributed under the GNU GPL license. Let’s begin with the installation.
In this tutorial, we will explain to you, how to install OpenVPN on Ubuntu 16.04. OpenVPN is one of the most popular VPN software solutions, on both server-side and client-side. OpenVPN implements virtual private network techniques for creating secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities. This guide should work on other Linux VPS systems as well but was tested and written for Ubuntu 16.04 VPS. Installing OpenVPN on Ubuntu 16.04, is an easy task if you carefully follow the steps below.