Here I am, happily living in the beautiful city of Shanghai, in my beloved new socialist motherland of the People’s Republic of China. Just got the new job, making decent money, found a nice place to live, and life is really good. Only one problem, though it’s so small a problem that I hesitate to call it such.
To be blunt, the Great Firewall is total ballsack. I didn’t care when it was just Youtube and Facebook, but now Gmail is flickering constantly and it’ll take five or six refreshes just to get through to my inbox - to say nothing of the fact that I maintain three e-mail addresses for different purposes, and checking my e-mail becomes a forty-five minute odyssey of whacking the refresh button, doing every kind of bandwidth-voodoo to make sure everything goes right ruddy proper, and calling people on the phone to make sure that my e-mail actually went through to them. Google Drive is totally off-limits.
I’ll pay money, but I won’t be a sucker. Any other doper China-hands to share a good VPN that’ll slice through the bullshit and get me what I need?
The free VPN I use (GoAgent) hasn’t really worked since over two weeks ago. The internet has been awful due to the 18th Party Congress that took place down the street from here. Hopefully the internet goes back to “normal” soon now that they’ve paraded out the top seven leaders. Though I saw Hu and Xi today on TV in front of a big military assembly so maybe the transition is still going on.
Before GoAgent I used Freegate, which is much easier to set up but can be slow at times. It hasn’t been working either for the past couple weeks.
I haven’t used it much (and it was a little tweaky to setup on my Android tablet) but the one I found recommended on-line was WiTopia. Once I got it running it worked fine.
I have read vaguely about using a free Amazon Web Services (AWS) account to setup your own VPN. I wish someone would post or provide a plain English guide on how to do this, because the existant guides I could find all presume some level of expertise in Unix/web development which i don’t have and I can’t make heads or tails of their instructions.
I was previously using VPNUK, but found that for the same price (US$10) overplay gives me access to servers from 40 countries and is much more user friendly to use.