Other Speedfusion Hosts? (Using Vultr)

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
#1

What are some other affordable SpeedFusion hosts other than Vultr? What are you all using?

I’ve been using them for about a year and for $5/m it’s hard to complain but lately there has been a lot of times that my connection has been down.

I run most all of my traffic through SpeedFusion.

While I have your ear… If you are using SpeedFusion, do you have issues with Netflix and other streaming services blocking you due to using a VPN?

I have 3 WLAN and 1 USB connection to my Balance 210 but the max speed I’m getting is maybe 60Mbs. Each individual connection is faster than that. Does this sound like a configuration issue or maybe something with Vultr?

#2

My own servers in my own racks :slight_smile:

But for cheap and cheerful public cloud providers you could also look into Digital Ocean or Linode perhaps as well as Vultr.

All have options for < $10 USD / month with a Tb or more of data transfer.

If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with how you deploy the FusionHub too you can use just about anybody (this is not as simple a setup though and almost certainly not supported by Peplink but involves using a ramdisk to store the image file and then overwrite the existing virtual drive with that image).

You will encounter this issue if you use just about any of the big public providers to host the FH, their IP space is well known to Netflix et. al. and as far as they are concererned this would be an unusual place for a typical home user to be viewing content from so it is blocked, given they were typically used by lots of the public VPN providers as a way to locate yourself to another country to get around locaised content restrictions. Best work around in most cases is just to do some outbound policy to send traffic for those services directly out one of your WANs.

What are the bandwidths and types of the individual links? Is one of them significantly underperforming perhaps and dragging down all the rest? The balance 210 is also only rated for 80Mbps of PepVPN with encryption, 150Mbps without - if you are using encryption and seeing 60ish I’d say you are not missing too much.

#3

A week ago I built a FusionHub on a $5 server at Digital Ocean. It works well.

I used this image https://download.peplink.com/firmware/fusionhub/fusionhub-do.vmdk which I got from this thread FusionHub - Installation in Digital Ocean.

I’m not sure how I would have found that image directly. It doesn’t seem to be here https://www.peplink.com/support/downloads/

#4

Its less than a month old. Effectively its a release Candidate waiting for us to let them know if it breaks anything or not. If not it will get rolled into the main fusionhub package as a link I would imagine like the Google Compute and RAW image links.

#5

Hello.

Encryption is not used. I read in another post where someone had two ATT LTE connections and several thought that having multiple connections from the same provider could prevent a user from seeing the speeds they would expect. In my case, all four of mine are with the same provider (VZ). Different accounts though.

If I do not use Speedfusion, the speeds max out to what the router is rated for.

One of the main reasons I switched to SpeedFusion is because I felt that without it, I was having too many complaints from people in online meetings who said my voice is getting choppy. Not sure if others have experienced that or not. I haven’t tested without using it in some time so I should.

I just added a T-Mobile Home ISP account so I should throw that into the mix with the VZ accounts and see what happens since those are different providers.

#6

Besides vultr we have been using UpCloud. Same price ($5/month) and we’ve have been happy with both. I tend to recommend UpCloud, due to aspects not related to core functionality (I am biased, I guess, I tend to trust the privacy statements of European service providers over those headquartered in other jurisdictions)

Our usage is light, so the systems have not been stressed.

The block is not about VPN per se, but rather that of VPN server farms that are likely to be employed in a copyright-infringing way by (some) users.

E.g., our UpCloud-based server in San José is on the Netflix no-show list, whereas a Balance 380 hub on a regular ISP-provided IP address is not, regardless of whether the traffic from that server originated in the EU and connected via SpeedFusion.

The Balance 210 has a 350Mbps throughput capability, but for SpeedFusion it drops to 80Mbps (encrypted)/150Mbps (unencrypted).

Cheers,

Z