Bon Jour Alle, I am curious to find out what type of skill set or professional backgrounds are needed to develop, oversee and run a VPN service? What type of education is required or what type of admin technicians would have the skill set to be able to create a VPN service and the like, from zero/nothing? It is all a new and intriguing industry and I would like to know the types of geniuses that are around to be able to do this type of stuff. Thank you in advance if indeed you lend a hand to educate me. Shhhhhhh ;-) Merci.
You need a strong understanding of networking and Linux server administration, and a good amount of knowledge of cryptography. A little more than I have but there's other forum members that are smarter. Assuming the service has a website, you'll need to know a CMS well or learn HTML/CSS/PHP/SQL to do that yourself. All in all if you're starting from zero, it should only take a month or two to learn everything. I don't think starting a new VPN is a super profitable business though. Too much competition, bandwidth is essentially a commodity and big players like PIA are going to put you out of business unless you have some major innovation (which you probably don't).
As we know from HideMyAss, it can range from enthusiast origins, right up to professional operations - depends what the service is attempting to offer, and what threats it's trying to protect against. To do it well, and satisfy what most people here would ideally like, you'd have to have: Money - quite a lot of it to fund the stuff below Head office in suitable jurisdiction. Subsidiary locations in suitable jurisdictions Data centers and servers in above Suitable amount of bandwidth to meet the load/expectations Designers & security professionals to select server hardware software and config for VPN service Designers & security professionals to create client software for Windows, Linux and tablets/phones Operational staff to run the servers Security analysts & incident response team Customer service staff Billing/payment system (including Bitcoin, cash etc) Lawyers Management team - ideally known and identifiable in suitable jurisdictions I think it's quite hard & expensive to do it properly, and there are already people doing it. Alternatively, if you want to run your own service and have traffic cover, then that's a different proposition.
Depending upon how much research you want to do. Glance at the forums being hosted by a few big trusted vpn providers. Just one example: https://airvpn.org Pay attention to their threads discussing the client being used to connect users. You can see and get a feel for the depth of trial and error during development. Go to github and grab the open source code if you want a total look at how it works. This is just one example. The top 4-5 providers here are discussed at length and you'll see their knowledge is anything but beginner.
This is the Cloak team: https://www.getcloak.com/about/company/ The support section on their website might be useful if you want to learn more about VPN: https://support.getcloak.com/
