Why Use a VPS as a Secure Business VPN

Nov 02, 2026

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Why Use a VPS as a Secure Business VPN

Businesses often have their staff working remotely or across locations and they need a streamlined way to work together or reach business systems securely. During all this, they’d rather have their sensitive traffic not cross the open sea of the internet and publicly exposed servers. A perfectly reasonable request by all means. In this piece, we’re going to help you with that. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the protocol decisions, self-hosting benefits, VPS suitability for this type of work, sizing, and other practical considerations.

Protocol Decisions

The first real choice is deciding on the protocol.

• WireGuard is the modern default. Extremely lean codebase (roughly 4,000 lines vs OpenVPN’s hundreds of thousands, which means a smaller attack surface), runs in the Linux kernel, uses current cryptography (ChaCha20, Curve25519), and delivers noticeably higher throughput and lower latency than OpenVPN. Uses UDP. Simple key-pair config. For most new business deployments, this is the recommendation.
• OpenVPN is the mature, flexible workhorse. SSL/TLS-based, runs over UDP or TCP, and crucially can run on TCP port 443 to slip through restrictive corporate/hotel firewalls that block everything else. Broadest client support. Heavier and slower than WireGuard. Free for 2 simultaneous connections, then licensed per-connection beyond that.
• IPsec/IKEv2 is worth a mention here. It’s also strong and natively supported by built-in Windows/macOS/iOS clients (no extra app to install), handles mobile network switching well (MOBIKE), common for site-to-site, but ultimately more fiddly to configure than WireGuard.
• Avoid PPTP! PPTP is obsolete and cryptographically broken, it should never be used for a business VPN. L2TP/IPsec is dated.

Self-Hosting vs. Commercial VPS

In most business situations, self-hosting on a VPS beats a commercial VPN services. The #1 reason that should be enough for most companies is that you control everything. From the server and its configuration to the logging policy—it’s all under your complete control. There’s no third party in the middle of your business traffic.

But of course, there are other benefits as well.

For example, your business gets a dedicated static IP. This single, known IP can be whitelisted with banks, suppliers, client systems, and IP-restricted APOs. Commercial VPS will likely hand you shared Ips that rotate and frequently land on blocklists (remember those CAPTCHAs?).

VPS comes with its own IP, so the whole team can present one trusted address.

Directly stemming from that, you have the secondary benefit of not having any shared-IP reputation problem. As you’re not sharing an egress IP with strangers who might be doing rather questionable things (you never know + not under your control at all, not safe for the long term), you’re safe from getting blocked. This is why you’ll often hear about commercial VPN IPs getting blocked.

Another key advantage is the flat cost regardless of headcount. With a self-hosted VPN, the cost is the server, not per seat. Commercial business VPNs charge you on a per-user per-month basis. Over time, or if more people use it, self-hosting is often cheaper. It’s still bounded by server capacity, but a flat increase in your server capacity/resources is still going to be cheaper in most situations than paying for 50 more seats per month that require you to expand the capabilities in the first place, for example.

Why a VPS Specifically Suits this Workload

VPN is a light compute workload, the constraint is network throughput and encryption, not RAM or disk. That means it’s cheap to run well. The most important hardware fact here is that encryption throughput is bounded by CPU. Modern processors today come with AES-NI to accelerate this and WireGuard is efficient regardless. For typical SMB remote access workloads, this is minimal. And if you have a requirement for high sustained bandwidth, all you need to do is size your CPU allocation accordingly.

Also, because a VPN adds a network hop, the quality of the host’s network matters more here than for most workloads. Our Australian infrastructure with multi-carrier feeds (Telstra, Optus, TPG/iiNet), BGP shortest-path routing, and upstream DDoS scrubbing all mean the extra hop stays fast and low-latency for Australian business owners. Our dedicated (not oversold) resources mean your VPN throughput isn’t stolen by a noisy neighbor. Self-healing failover keeps the VPN, and therefore everyone’s access, up if hardware fails. Traffic exits on an Australian IP—useful for reaching AU-geolocated services and for keeping data paths onshore.

Sizing

A business VPN is one of the lightest things you can run on a VPS. The entry Linux VPS (from $12.50/mo) comfortably handles a small team’s remote access, WireGuard especially sips resources.

The real variables are concurrent connections and total throughput, not user count on paper. Size CPU up if you expect many users pushing heavy sustained traffic simultaneously (large file transfers, video), leave it modest for standard access.

Also, our scale-any-time and scheduled upgrades mean starting small is safe. Build Your Own to right-size!

Other Practical Considerations

Alright, let’s end with a few practical, real-world considerations so you’ll find it easy to set all this up.

• Security: WireGuard uses public/private key pairs; OpenVPN uses certificates. Far stronger than password-only. The correct pattern is to expose only the VPN’s single port and put everything else behind it (WireGuard UDP 51820, OpenVPN UDP 1194 (or TCP 443 for firewall traversal). MFA can be added on top (OpenVPN supports auth plugins), and access can be restricted per user with individual keys that are easy to revoke when someone leaves. This is another operational advantage over a shared office VPN password.
• Setup: Setting up a VPN is well-trodden ground, mature open-source tooling and the VPN projects’ own installers make it far less daunting than it sounds, and WireGuard in particular is genuinely simple to configure. Not to mention that our Australian L3 techs can help with the underlying Linux server, OS, and general setup.
• Costing: Flat monthly server cost (from $12.50/mo for Linux), independent of how many staff use it. This makes it an attractive deal over commercial VPS, which are typically per user, per month, with cost climbing with headcount.
• WireGuard vs. OpenVPN: Choose WireGuard for speed and simplicity. OpenVPN when you need TCP 443 firewall traversal or its ecosystem.

Number of Users: The last practical consideration—how many users can one VPS VPN handle? Well, as it turns out, plenty of users for an SMB on a small server. It scales with CPU/bandwidth.

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