Why is becoming a VPN provider not so easy?
Hello.
Recently, I published an article about how I closed my VPN service and put it in the open source .
After that, quite a lot of people wrote to me, being interested in more detail about the reasons for the closure and the pitfalls of such a business.
As a result, I noticed that in the process of communication I told everyone about the same thing, and decided to write this article.
Next, I will tell some interesting cases about running a VPN business.
Firstly, the VPN providers market is very saturated. When I decided to engage in this business, I certainly did not look at how many providers in general exist.
Of course, I knew about such giants as HMA, StrongVPN, and used it myself before. But I had no idea that there are so many small-sized VPN providers.
Only at the time of registration in Webmoney Megastock, I saw how many VPN providers already accept WM, these are only Russian services!
')
In this service are different. Some work only with the Russian audience, others from the western, and others focus on China. Pricing is also very different, from about $ 1 to $ 50.
The moral of this story, as I said before, is that the VPN market is very rich, there are a lot of services, and the competition is very tough. Therefore, if you are interested in this business and you want to do it, make money and look for a person who can sell well on the net.
Continuing the theme of conquering the VPN market, I will say a few words about the psychology of the client.
The fact is that selling VPN is very difficult. It is much more difficult than, for example, selling an app in appstore, or a paid subscription to Internet radio.
When a customer buys Internet radio, the worst thing that can happen to him is that the radio will not work and they will not get the money back. That is, he will lose a few hundred rubles.
When a customer buys a VPN, then in addition to money for the service, his personal correspondence, plastic card numbers, access details to social networks or any other information can get into third hands. Well if these hands are clean.
Therefore, in order to successfully sell a VPN, it is necessary to gain the loyalty and trust of users. It is good if you have excellent reviews on some TOP of similar services, or in your Vkontakte group, or somewhere else. Because without feedback, few people want to use your service.
Clients should trust you, so do honest business.
Since VPN is a client service, you will certainly have to support your users.
In most cases, problems are quite banal and monotonous, so you can start Zendesk or something like that, and keep a knowledge base in it, where solutions to common problems will be described step by step.
But there are really difficult situations.
For example, a client comes to you who has paid money for the service, and he is unable to connect.
In the process of communicating with him, you collect information bit by bit and find out that:
With such situations you have to fight, somehow solve them, or return the money to customers.
Continuing the topic of user support, I will say that you need to be prepared for both sane and completely inadequate users.
Very often there are clients who consider themselves to be professionals in computers and networks. As a rule, they are immediately recognized by self-confident messages, and “pseudo-deep” questions, such as:
Client: And what is your port speed?
Support: If you're talking about the width of the channel, then on the server de1.smartvpn.biz - 100mb / s, on the rest 1gb / s
Customer: 100 ?? Oooh, well, this is not serious, I have a channel speed of 735!
As a rule, such people, having seen the figure 735 somewhere, consider that they never have a loss of speed on terrible WiFi.
Also that between their laptop and some website on the Internet, information moves instantly, in any amount,without SMS and advertising .
Often, such users themselves begin to offer “set up a server” so that the speed is “735”.
An integral part of the VPN business of course are abuses.
Probably, my service was not in production for so long, but I only met with abuses once.
The client came, paid for the service, set up the connection without any questions and started using it. Of course, this is a spherical situation in a vacuum, but sometimes it happens, yes.
And the next day a letter comes from the hoster that porn is being downloaded from your servers, the copyright of which is Brazzers.
At the same time, if you do not keep logs, and you don’t have to keep them, you cannot identify which client is downloading illegal content.
Fortunately, at that moment, only one user was on the server, and it was possible to identify him by the time of the connection and according to the information in the record.
I warned the user that according to the EULA he cannot use VPN for illegal actions, after which he silently stopped using the server.
A hoster for the first time forgave us, but promised to turn off in case of repeated similar misunderstandings.
My guess is that the approved small number of abuses due to the low price segment of my VPN, carders, hackers and other criminal elements will take advantage of a more expensive, bulletproof VPN. And lovers of “freebies” will find a free VPN or proxy.
A very popular service, judging by user requests, is dedicated IP.
Unfortunately, we provided it on request and at a higher price, since the hoster did not allow connecting additional IPs to the servers, and we had to rent a separate low-end server for such clients.
There were also customers who required a dedicated IP, which was never used anywhere, during the entire existence of the Internet. At the same time they needed some kind of guarantees and documents. Such a situation can soon be attributed to the section “Inadequate customers”.
Therefore, if you decide to engage in a VPN business, immediately think about the allocated addresses, it is desirable that these IPs could be easily changed (for example, for an additional fee).
I do not remember exactly when, but this year the VPN in China broke down with many providers. After reading the news on hackernews, I learned that the Chinese firewall has become smarter and more efficient in blocking VPNs.
Some people advised to move OpenVPN to tcp: 443, which, as you understand, did not help at all.
I will not retell the content of this article www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china , in two words - the Chinese firewall distinguishes between OpenVPN traffic and HTTPS, and in order to bypass, you need to mask OpenVPN under something else.
But in this case, you need to understand that your users will also have to install additional software, in addition to the OpenVPN client.
So, it would be nice to have your own custom vpn client, in which you along with updates can sew up additional software for obfuscation of traffic to the vpn server.
VPN business is very interesting, but at the same time difficult. Alone, they are unlikely to work out, because it will be necessary:
Understand Networks
Understand programming
Understanding Unix Systems
To be able to program for mobile platforms, desktop
and…
Be able to sell online
Be able to promote your service
Provide technical support to customers
But in any case, it is better to try than to regret all your life.
Therefore, I wish everyone to try, run their startups, and gain experience.
I hope this material will be useful to someone.
Recently, I published an article about how I closed my VPN service and put it in the open source .
After that, quite a lot of people wrote to me, being interested in more detail about the reasons for the closure and the pitfalls of such a business.
As a result, I noticed that in the process of communication I told everyone about the same thing, and decided to write this article.
Next, I will tell some interesting cases about running a VPN business.
Saturated market
Firstly, the VPN providers market is very saturated. When I decided to engage in this business, I certainly did not look at how many providers in general exist.
Of course, I knew about such giants as HMA, StrongVPN, and used it myself before. But I had no idea that there are so many small-sized VPN providers.
Only at the time of registration in Webmoney Megastock, I saw how many VPN providers already accept WM, these are only Russian services!
')
In this service are different. Some work only with the Russian audience, others from the western, and others focus on China. Pricing is also very different, from about $ 1 to $ 50.
The moral of this story, as I said before, is that the VPN market is very rich, there are a lot of services, and the competition is very tough. Therefore, if you are interested in this business and you want to do it, make money and look for a person who can sell well on the net.
VPN is a very "intimate" service.
Continuing the theme of conquering the VPN market, I will say a few words about the psychology of the client.
The fact is that selling VPN is very difficult. It is much more difficult than, for example, selling an app in appstore, or a paid subscription to Internet radio.
When a customer buys Internet radio, the worst thing that can happen to him is that the radio will not work and they will not get the money back. That is, he will lose a few hundred rubles.
When a customer buys a VPN, then in addition to money for the service, his personal correspondence, plastic card numbers, access details to social networks or any other information can get into third hands. Well if these hands are clean.
Therefore, in order to successfully sell a VPN, it is necessary to gain the loyalty and trust of users. It is good if you have excellent reviews on some TOP of similar services, or in your Vkontakte group, or somewhere else. Because without feedback, few people want to use your service.
Clients should trust you, so do honest business.
Sophisticated network configurations
Since VPN is a client service, you will certainly have to support your users.
In most cases, problems are quite banal and monotonous, so you can start Zendesk or something like that, and keep a knowledge base in it, where solutions to common problems will be described step by step.
But there are really difficult situations.
For example, a client comes to you who has paid money for the service, and he is unable to connect.
In the process of communicating with him, you collect information bit by bit and find out that:
- He is trying to connect using the iPad which gives out 3G over WiFi
- An access point is connected to this WiFi.
- To which the laptop is connected
- On which one more VPN to another provider is already raised
- And your VPN conflicts with this chain (most likely a problem with routes).
With such situations you have to fight, somehow solve them, or return the money to customers.
Inadequate users
Continuing the topic of user support, I will say that you need to be prepared for both sane and completely inadequate users.
Very often there are clients who consider themselves to be professionals in computers and networks. As a rule, they are immediately recognized by self-confident messages, and “pseudo-deep” questions, such as:
Client: And what is your port speed?
Support: If you're talking about the width of the channel, then on the server de1.smartvpn.biz - 100mb / s, on the rest 1gb / s
Customer: 100 ?? Oooh, well, this is not serious, I have a channel speed of 735!
As a rule, such people, having seen the figure 735 somewhere, consider that they never have a loss of speed on terrible WiFi.
Also that between their laptop and some website on the Internet, information moves instantly, in any amount,
Often, such users themselves begin to offer “set up a server” so that the speed is “735”.
Abuzas
An integral part of the VPN business of course are abuses.
Probably, my service was not in production for so long, but I only met with abuses once.
The client came, paid for the service, set up the connection without any questions and started using it. Of course, this is a spherical situation in a vacuum, but sometimes it happens, yes.
And the next day a letter comes from the hoster that porn is being downloaded from your servers, the copyright of which is Brazzers.
At the same time, if you do not keep logs, and you don’t have to keep them, you cannot identify which client is downloading illegal content.
Fortunately, at that moment, only one user was on the server, and it was possible to identify him by the time of the connection and according to the information in the record.
I warned the user that according to the EULA he cannot use VPN for illegal actions, after which he silently stopped using the server.
A hoster for the first time forgave us, but promised to turn off in case of repeated similar misunderstandings.
My guess is that the approved small number of abuses due to the low price segment of my VPN, carders, hackers and other criminal elements will take advantage of a more expensive, bulletproof VPN. And lovers of “freebies” will find a free VPN or proxy.
Dedicated IP
A very popular service, judging by user requests, is dedicated IP.
Unfortunately, we provided it on request and at a higher price, since the hoster did not allow connecting additional IPs to the servers, and we had to rent a separate low-end server for such clients.
There were also customers who required a dedicated IP, which was never used anywhere, during the entire existence of the Internet. At the same time they needed some kind of guarantees and documents. Such a situation can soon be attributed to the section “Inadequate customers”.
Therefore, if you decide to engage in a VPN business, immediately think about the allocated addresses, it is desirable that these IPs could be easily changed (for example, for an additional fee).
Great Chinese Firewall
I do not remember exactly when, but this year the VPN in China broke down with many providers. After reading the news on hackernews, I learned that the Chinese firewall has become smarter and more efficient in blocking VPNs.
Some people advised to move OpenVPN to tcp: 443, which, as you understand, did not help at all.
I will not retell the content of this article www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china , in two words - the Chinese firewall distinguishes between OpenVPN traffic and HTTPS, and in order to bypass, you need to mask OpenVPN under something else.
But in this case, you need to understand that your users will also have to install additional software, in addition to the OpenVPN client.
So, it would be nice to have your own custom vpn client, in which you along with updates can sew up additional software for obfuscation of traffic to the vpn server.
Conclusion
VPN business is very interesting, but at the same time difficult. Alone, they are unlikely to work out, because it will be necessary:
Understand Networks
Understand programming
Understanding Unix Systems
To be able to program for mobile platforms, desktop
and…
Be able to sell online
Be able to promote your service
Provide technical support to customers
But in any case, it is better to try than to regret all your life.
Therefore, I wish everyone to try, run their startups, and gain experience.
I hope this material will be useful to someone.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/262843/
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