VPN server bandwidth requirements

[TheGreySpectre]

I am looking at taking an old box an with linux to host a vpn for my friends and I. Currently my Internet is 25Mb down, 6Mb Up. Is that enough for a vpn of maybe 5 to 10 people?

[kayson]

what do you want to use the vpn for?

[thideras]

From my understanding, the VPN doesn't really take bandwidth itself (except to connect or keep-alive), but instead what you want to pass through it. Sort of like a SSH connection to a computer. When I'm connected to my server, it takes virtually no bandwidth to sit at a command prompt, but once I start giving commands or running programs, the usage goes up.

Basically, you need to find how much bandwidth you will need for the programs and figure out how much overhead there is for the connection. That should give you your total bandwidth needed.

[TheGreySpectre]

The VPN would primarily be used for gaming.

[thideras]

Again, you need to know how much bandwidth and the overhead to know the total.

[DaveHCYJ]

Gaming isn't really the best use of a VPN. VPNs are primarily used as a way to securely connect to a network. Gaming traffic isn't really the kind of thing you need to worry about hiding from people. Also the overhead of encrypting all the traffic will have some negative impact on the performance of your game.

[TheGreySpectre]

I have gamed over vpns before without suffering negative performance. Currently we use hamachi which is a form of vpn, we were going to move outside of hamachi to have more control of the vpn though.

[kayson]

I have gamed over vpns before without suffering negative performance. Currently we use hamachi which is a form of vpn, we were going to move outside of hamachi to have more control of the vpn though.

If you use hamachi without any problem you'll probably have no problem with a vpn server.