A few days ago I bought a very cheap Virtual Private Server (VPS) – check my post here: https://www.ajni.it/2020/03/quick-tip-cheap-private-servers-on-the-cloud/

It was very cheap (4$ or 3.75€ annually), but with a lot of gotchas.

One of them is Ubuntu 18.04 Minimal, which means a lot of packages will not be pre-installed, causing a lot of pain when installing services like in my example OpenVPN.

Here is how I managed to install OpenVPN on Ubuntu 18.04 Minimal.

Updating the system:

apt update

apt upgrade

Install OpenVPN

wget https://git.io/vpn -O openvpn-install.sh && bash openvpn-install.sh

The first problem occurs with the root CA certificates:

Install the root certificates in order to trust them:

apt-get install ca-certificates

After re-running the command, another error shows up:

Install the next package (iptables):

apt-get install iptables

And finally, the OpenVPN setup can be run:

I had to set a custom port, because only specific ones were NAT’d to my server. You might leave the port to default. I am also using 1.1.1.1 for DNS.

After the setup is finished, a configuration file will be created. This file contains the public certificates and private key that are mandatory for the connection. It can be imported into the OpenVPN client (Windows) through the GUI.

On Linux, a simple

openvpn configfile.ovpn

does the trick.

If you are looking for a VPS with good performance, check out Evolution Host at https://evolution-host.com/vps-hosting.php.
They offer virtual servers starting at 5€ per month.