We're happy to announce that we have a VPN server in Chicago now. It's our fourth data center in the US, and we hope that it'll offer our American customers in the region even better speeds than our other servers in New York, Los Angeles and Miami.
As always, the VPN server in Chicago is physically owned by us and contains zero hard drives, is completely log free and has the same security features as in all of OVPN's data centers.
Accessing the VPN server in Chicago, USA
There are a couple of different ways to connect to the VPN server in Chicago.
Desktop client
As old server lists may be cached from before the servers were launched, please note that you might be required to manually log out and log in again to load the new server list. If you have yet to install the OVPN Desktop client, you can get started here.
- Login to the OVPN Desktop client
- Option 1: Choose "Select best server in USA" in the first drop-down menu and press connect.
- Option 2: Choose "Select server manually". Select the new server in Chicago in the server list and press connect.
OpenVPN GUI and third party systems
To connect with OpenVPN GUI, Tunnelblick, Viscosity or any other third party VPN client, new configuration files for Chicago have been made available in each of their guides. Simply select your corresponding setup guide here and follow the steps.
Data center & server specifications
We're currently renting 1U in QuadraNet's data center on 1905 Lunt Avenue. As of now, we have a 1 Gbit/s uplink to QuadraNet's network. The current transit and peering capabilities are GT-T/Hibernia Networks, Zayo & Telia.
As soon as we get close to reaching the max capacity of the server, we will make sure to send additional servers in order to continue delivering great speeds to our customers.
The server in the rack is of model HP ProLiant DL20 Gen9 which is equipped with an Intel® Xeon® E3-1220 v5 @ 3.00GHz processor, 8 GB RAM and 2x1 GbE Intel NICs. Just like in all other data centers, the server operates without any hard drives or any other form of permanent storage.
Picture of the server
Our previous solution was to co-locate three VPN servers and a switch per data center. That approach turned out to be too expensive as we needed to rent 10 height units in a rack as well as purchase the needed hardware. We have modified our deployment setup, so we only need to co-locate one server, without reducing any of our security requirements.
