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Virtual office for remote team
It has been a while since I last posted here, but I have still been lurking every now and then. Part of the reason for this is that for the last few years, I have been responsible for the technology in a small business and that has not left me a lot of spare time.
The business operates in the US, however our team is fully remote with members scattered throughout the US as well as other parts of the world, and most of us also tend to travel quite often. Although there's many benefits to this, it also brings some challenges with it. One that seems to be causing more and more headaches lately is access to online resources, due to what I assume to be an increasing amount of anti-fraud measures:
1. some websites do not accept visitors from outside the US
2. some websites do not accept visitors that are using a VPN
3. some websites have repeatedly suspended our user for "suspicious activity" (likely because we are forced to share a single user, so their system sees us logging in from several different locations in a relatively short time span and deems it high risk)
The only solution seems to be having the whole team on a VPN with a dedicated IP. We have attempted using "Business VPNs" as well as setting up our own VPN on a dedicated server from a hosting company, but there is still a set of websites that block access when they see the request coming from a hosting-related network. From my research it appears that several ISPs themselves have offered hosting services in the past, which may have worked, but they all seem to have either sold or discontinued that branch of their operations in the recent years. This leaves "residential" VPS/VPN/Proxy providers which all seem sketchy to varying levels, or renting an actual office space with a dedicated internet connection just to put a small box with a VPN in it which seems overkill on several levels (but might still be an option if we really can't find a more efficient solution).
Considering the increased amount of remote workers these days, I feel like there must be a solution to this, but I can't seem to find much. Has anyone here run into a similar issue and/or can think of something I haven't though of yet? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
Have you checked OxyLabs or BrightData? They are both huge proxy companies that seem to have quite a focus on corporate/enterprise customers and use-case. They're not the usual faceless, anonymous proxy company.
OxyLabs for example, seem to have a whitepaper published that details how they procure their residential proxies: https://oxylabs.io/Oxylabs_Residential_Proxy_Acquisition_Handbook.pdf
It seems at least worth a shot trying either of them out before resorting to leasing an office space and a dedicated line.
Something like Citrix VDI? Probably not a LowEnd solution though.
Some LET providers offer non-hosting/datacenter IPs, such as LittleCreek. It might be worth giving them a try.
you are on lowendtalk so i will give you lowend ideas.
tailscale has an easy "use node as endpoint gateway" meaning your users from outside US will access internet as your "home" node.
zerotier and tailscale will work perfectly. i have been running zerotier for past 3 years now and it just works perfectly and without any trouble.
i have used tailscale once but the free one needs social oath login which i am not a fan of but you can selfhost headscale so you are free. same for zerotier if you want more logins and have a VPS.
don't bother with anything paid.
Little creek has US residential IP's, maybe buy the cheapest plan for like a month and see if it works for you
I would suggest Amazon WorkSpaces, but that's somewhat an overkill (?) and is not low end, in terms of pricing etc.
Personally, I'm using it, along with other members of our group/team, for some work stuff and to access one of our customer's infrastructure.
Thank you for the suggestions. I did not know about either of them, and although they do both look very promising otherwise, the pricing of upwards of $10 per GB of traffic would almost definitely make the office rental option more cost-effective. I'm not necessarily looking for a low-end solution, but I was at least hoping to beat that.
Thanks. These are more so designed for accessing internal resources, and they depend on your own infrastructure, so even if it is possible to access the wider internet through them (which it sounds like it would be with the "use node as endpoint gateway" option), it would unfortunately not help with the part where some websites block traffic from hosting-related networks. This is the main roadblock at this point and without it the issue would already be solved.
Thank you for the suggestions! Since there's not much to lose, I will give a try to LittleCreek - might not be a permanent solution, but seems like it would likely at least be a temporary one. Meanwhile, I will also look into Citrix VDI and Amazon WorkSpaces, which seem similar if not equivalent services, but as I don't have any experience with them, I'm not quite sure how they would work.
Try Zscaler, many corporate use them for proxy/VPN. Easy to install, hard to maintenance, depend on your use case
Does Zscaler even work with small businesses? Haven't checked recently but last I saw their licenses started at 500 users.
@kmas
i do this exact thing for geo-restricted websites
I'm not sure about the license, because it is handled by a different department.
I may have a low cost solution
May I ask how many people are in your team and how much traffic do you need every month?
Where is your workers located at exactly?
If you have people working outside the US, have you been upfront with the providers and informed them that the only reason the ip conflicts show up as several different logins from different ip's is because you are having multiple users share your login(even though unless that was stated upfront would likely be seen as suspicious as you stated.)
Also some companies like CubeData will not accept orders from high risk countries like China and such due to there high chargeback/dispute rate in addition to not allowing orders from VPN's/Tor due to the same reasoning(high chargeback/dispute risk)
Since there is not really a solution to prevent that apart from possibly Crypto Payments which bring even more headache and likely abuse from specific countries even if there not paying in a way that would allow any sort of chargeback/dispute risk, generally it is better seen as a solution just to not accept orders whatsoever from this demographic and not have to deal with it. Which might be what you are ending up seeing basically, as this is what a Provider's viewpoint is basically(the flip side and reasoning you wouldn't generally know otherwise unless the providers you was using was just straight up and honest with you on this)
Get a vps with unmetered bandwidth ( buyvm for example )
Get starvpn subscription - it gives you a residential comcast or att IP in the US, and its $20/m.
Get OpenVPN creds from starvpn, set up wireguard on the buyvm vps, so you and your colleagues can connect to it, since it has a static IP, and route all outgoing traffic on buyvm via starvpn openvpn.
Their limit is 1TB/day, so you should be good to go with a fairly large team.