Let me tell you about my servers! Right now, I’ve got several running—one in Hong Kong 🇭🇰 and others in the United States 🇺🇸 (One of them is my content delivery machine dedicated to this website). I host some fun stuff on them, such as some of my hobby projects like TinyUrls and Transcribly but mainly I use them to set up proxies so I can access YouTube and Google Scholars.
I can’t remember exactly when I first started messing around with Virtual Private Servers. Probably sometime around 2021, during the pandemic. My parents kept saying, “Staying home all the time is just making you play more video games.”
Why they were completely wrong:
Let me rewind and show you how this all actually started. Honestly, I was bored out of my mind. Internet games weren’t doing it for me anymore—I needed something more challenging. That’s when I stumbled into coding (Python and C++), and through some forum, I discovered this AI thing called GPT.
I was instantly hooked. I started learning everything I could about it, even during online classes (okay yeah, my grades took a bit of a hit). But here’s the problem: trying to learn more about AI on Baidu or other Chinese sites was basically impossible. The information I needed just wasn’t there.
That’s when I decided I needed to get past the Great Firewall. (And no, don’t ask me to teach you how—it’s … not exactly legal.)
You see, China’s internet is heavily restricted. Sure, you can download VPNs from app stores, but who knows if they’re collecting your data? So the question became: how do I actually bypass this safely? My curiosity pushed me to start researching, even though I knew almost nothing about networking, proxies, or servers at the time.
I spent hours on forums, reading guides, trying different tools. Eventually, I discovered Virtual Private Servers (VPS). And wow—these weren’t just for hosting a personal blog or a Minecraft server with friends. They were the key to accessing the open internet. It felt like unlocking a whole new world.
In 2021, I rented my first VPS. It became way more than just a tool for browsing—it turned into my personal playground for learning. I started simple, setting up proxies like WireGuard and SOCKS. They worked at first, but got blocked pretty quickly. So I moved on to protocols like VLESS and VMess, which were more stable and harder to detect.
Before long, I was hosting my own projects, experimenting with coding frameworks and running my own blog. I was even training AI models, but unfortunately it failed due to insufficient budget for high-end GPUs. Every breakthrough felt amazing, except when I spent hours debugging, only to realise that a tiny typo in a config file had broken everything while compiling OpenWrt. (GPT only took three minutes to achieve the same thing)
While everyone else was binge-watching shows or gaming during the pandemic, I was building things. Don’t get me wrong—there were plenty of failures. Servers crashed. I once accidentally (purely out of curioucity I admit) ran rm -rf /* 🤦♂️ (thanks, sleep deprivation). But honestly? Those mistakes taught me more about patience and problem-solving than anything else could have.
Looking back, this wasn’t just about bypassing censorship. It was about independence. About learning. About creating instead of just consuming. I went from being someone who used technology to someone who actually built with it. And that shift changed everything for me.
Even my parents eventually came around (see, I told them a thousand times it wasn’t just about games!). What started as “wasting time on the computer” became the foundation for everything I’m doing in tech today—and I’m still building on it.