But if you happen to have a cloud-based Linux server running anyway, building a WireGuard VPN can be a simple and free way to add some serious, compromise-free security and privacy to your life.

If you plan to limit the VPN to just devices owned by you and a few friends, you'll probably never even notice any extra resource load on your server. Even if you had to fire up and pay for a dedicated AWS EC2 t2.micro reserved instance, the annual costs should still come out significantly cheaper than most commercial VPNs. And, as a bonus, you'll get complete control over your data.

Right now I'm going to show you how all that would work using the open source WireGuard software on an Ubuntu Linux server.

Why WireGuard? Because it's really easy to use, is designed to be particularly attack resistant, and it's so good at what it does that it was recently incorporated into the Linux kernel itself.

The actual work to make this happen really will take only five minutes - or less. Having said that, planning things out, troubleshooting for unexpected problems and, if necessary, launching a new server might add significant time to the project.