Living in China? What’s your proxy/vpn setup?

I know there are a handful of people here who are living in China. What kind of VPN or proxy setup do you use?

For normal firewall bypassing, I’m having great success with Shadowsocks, it’s fast, more reliable than a VPN, and not too expensive. But the problem I have is that I can VPN or proxy over my shadowsock. For example, I just lost an Instagram account, most likely because I wasn’t using a residential proxy or location based VPN.

I have subscriptions to a couple commercial VPN’s, but none are working in China anymore.

I also use a Hong Kong based SIM card, which is roaming while in the Mainland, and that allows me to bypass the firewall. But the data is not cheap, so I can’t use this constantly.

So I am curious what others are relying on.

Also, I don’t think anyone needs to name actual services, since anytime they are named, they become targets to be taken down.

Just get yourself an aws ec2/vultr for 2.5$ per month. Deploy your own ss server, or use it as a layer of socks5 over the commercial ss service you are using.

Peekypoky said:

Just get yourself an aws ec2/vultr for 2.5$ per month. Deploy your own ss server, or use it as a layer of socks5 over the commercial ss service you are using.

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That went over my head, but I do know these words, which is enough for some google-foo. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it!

Mr Shmuel said:

That went over my head, but I do know these words, which is enough for some google-foo. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it!

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Oh by the way, I heard ppl have exhausted almost all of vultr’s IPs, which means it’s hard to find a vultr’s ip that has not been blocked by the gfw. So maybe don’t try too hard with vultr.
Cheers

@YujinTan i think you’re living in China. Care to share your setup?

Why only Vultr, why not look for any VPS provider you can find and either create an Open VPN server or simply a Windows VPS and connect to it.

HydraProxy said:

Why only Vultr, why not look for any VPS provider you can find and either create an Open VPN server or simply a Windows VPS and connect to it.

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I can't give you a technical answer, but I know these things rarely last. China sees it, and either throttles you so much you quit, or they shut down your access.

Shadowsocks are special proxies setup to get past the GFW, standard options like the ones you mentioned are easy for them to spot.

*Someone else correct me if I'm wrong please.

HydraProxy said:

Why only Vultr, why not look for any VPS provider you can find and either create an Open VPN server or simply a Windows VPS and connect to it.

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Tried this, it was good while it lasted, however that wasn't very long. You need to constantly change servers as they all get detected and blocked within a couple of weeks at most. I can't find anything that works better than paying 360rmb (55usd) per year for a constantly-updated list of Shadowsocks servers.