Who writes on VPNSmith
Our team: who we are, what we benchmark, and why we take this self-host obsession seriously.
EG
Eric Gerard
Founder · Self-host VPN and GDPR VPS specialist
Affiliate marketer for 12 years, former network admin at an industrial SMB (Cisco CCNA in 2014, expired but solid foundations). I launched VPNSmith because nearly every French VPS / VPN comparison recycles vendor spec sheets without testing anything. On this site, every WireGuard benchmark, every measured cost, every configuration script has been run by us, on our own Contabo / Hetzner / OVH VPS instances, and documented with the exact commands.
12+ years in affiliate marketing
Areas of coverage
- WireGuard and OpenVPN setup on Contabo, Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway
- iperf3 throughput benchmarks across 4 European VPS providers
- Linux hardening (UFW, fail2ban, auditd, sysctl)
- GDPR jurisdiction comparison (DE, FR, NL, FI) vs non-EU jurisdictions
- DPI obfuscation (Stealth, Cloak, V2Ray, Shadowsocks) for Iran/China bypass