AWS EC2 is a great idea. You can get 1 vCPU and 512MB of RAM for less than $5 per month. That's plenty enough resources to run OpenVPN.
Yup and it's actually even better than that. When you sign up for a new AWS account, they provide a defined base level of service for free ("AWS free tier") for the first year in an effort to get more people playing with AWS (read: getting people hooked).
AWS Free Tier Details: https://aws.amazon.com/free/
- 750 hours per month of a t2.micro Windows or linux instance (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 30GB EBS SSD disk) which is enough hours to run 1 instance 24x7 for the month.
- Unlimited network transfer inbound
- 15GB network transfer out for free. Additional TX out is ~$0.10 per GB depending on the region.
- Can launch that free instance in any of the AWS regions - Sao Paulo, Ireland, Frankfurt, etc... or elsewhere in the US (east or west coast)
Combine the AWS Free Tier ec2 t2.micro instance with an auto-provisioning (user data) script like this:
https://blog.ls20.com/ipsec-l2tp-vpn-auto-setup-for-ubuntu-12-04-on-amazon-ec2/
and you have your own, 100% managed by you & only you, 100% automated build, free VPN server that can be launched in any of ~15 countries.
But, you do need some AWS & linux admin skillz. This is not for someone that can barely spell Windows7.
Not that I would ever use a VPN setup like this myself, but I "hear" that it works wonderfully for bypassing NHL and MLB blackout of Red Wing & Tigers games.
And with the auto-provisioning script, if you're really paranoid, you can launch the server in < 5 minutes before a game and terminate it as soon as the game is done. It doesn't even need to be a persistent server.
And Tin, for people like us running RouterOS (e.g. MikroTik routers), you theoretically could, say, set a static route for your troubled traffic such that those destination IPs route out to the Internet over the L2TP VPN connection, while leaving the rest of your traffic alone. Which makes for a very simple solution, say, trying to get the MLB or NHL app on a Roku working where you cannot install/force a VPN app on the client side. All theoretical of course....