I'm surprised no one has mentioned Streisand, an open-source project that takes most (not all) of the effort out of setting up low-cost individual VPNs for yourself and your friends and family on a number of popular cloud services:
It takes a little bit of technical know-how (or bravery) to get started, but the setup process is dead-simple and you end up with a completely personal VPN with dozens of options that can work around a number of different situations. Best of all, it's entirely under your control. You can tear it down and start from scratch, or move to a new location or cloud provider easily. The docs are clear and easy to understand, and it's constantly being improved. It's a pretty remarkable project.
My issue with Streisand is that it spins up a dozen different services, of which I would like 1-2. Indeed, I then stumbled across Algo [1], which cited this as one of the motivating reasons for existing. It does 50% of what I'm after in setting up an IPSec VPN and does it all whilst generating my mobileconfigs.
Now all I need to do is manually set up a shadowsocks server and I'll be sorted. But I'd rather tackle that manually than also have the extra stuff streisand bundles in.
When running the streisand script it will now prompt you if you want to customize the install, allowing you to selectively choose which VPN daemons you want to run.
Oh thank you, that's wonderful news! I'll definitely look in to that if I have any frustrations with configuring SS myself. Even if I use Streisand for the SS side and Algo for the IPSec side, that would be a reasonable solution.
https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
It takes a little bit of technical know-how (or bravery) to get started, but the setup process is dead-simple and you end up with a completely personal VPN with dozens of options that can work around a number of different situations. Best of all, it's entirely under your control. You can tear it down and start from scratch, or move to a new location or cloud provider easily. The docs are clear and easy to understand, and it's constantly being improved. It's a pretty remarkable project.