I bet that works. Based on advice in an older HN thread about VPSes, I looked on lowendbox.com and found a Chicago VPS provider for $20/year for a 128M/5G VPS with 200GB/mo. of bandwidth. It seems to run OpenVPN just fine for when I've wanted to use it; I'm just using it when I'm on untrusted wifi, or to route around a network block.
I installed TunnelBlick on my mac to be the VPN client; it was a nice interface to setup for the client side, and handles things like DNS flushing automatically.
I'm also going to setup ssh servers on 80 and 443 for times when access to ports is restricted by the wifi provider.
The local community college blocks all sorts of websites with nannyware on the gateway. I tried changing DNS to googles: no change. I tried a few other things as well, no change. Looked for open proxies: "PROXY search prohibited".
What they didnt stop was looking for VPSes. I found one for 20$ a year as well. Loaded up immediately upon payment into a ubuntu 12.04 (rh, slackware, ubuntu, or debian: i dont care). I got a socks proxy running on its localhost, and then ssh tunnelled to the proxy. And there I went.
I do exactly this. Great for traveling to China and other countries where you might be outright blocked or worried about people snooping. Of course it doubles over on coffee shops and any other shared network you don't trust the provider or neighbors.
