>but you'd have to get a pretty nice VPN to not impact your experience by 250ms/req.
Eh? I was thinking the opposite, that's such a ludicrous latency overhead that it would be trivial to go to any VPS provider even sort of nearby and spin up a $5 instance with Algo. The only concern normally for some of them is the super cheap simple managed instances often have data caps too (though some provides are bandwidth limits only), but in this use case even that doesn't matter because the limits are still higher than Comcast's regardless. There are datacenters in Denver, but even if you had to go all the way to SF and it's a worst case adding 1800 miles RTT that should still only be around 10-14ms or so right? The article seems a little silly to go on so much about a few kb of data out of tens of gigabytes or a TB or whatever Comcast's caps are, but 250ms is wild, even without all the other breakage.
Although I've always heard that if you're ever forced to go Comcast, the average HN type would be best off seeking a Comcast Business connection that has actual support and customers that use the internet fully.
Agreed. I used to run all my traffic through a VPN I ran, and found that the average latency was lower than routing it to the default gateway.
This was possible because my server was well connected and very low latency talking to Comcast, and also very low latency talking to the rest of the Internet via Level-3, Time Warner, QWest and InterNAP. Where directly routed traffic would run over the Comcast network most of the way across the country.
One problem with this approach is many streaming content providers identify known VPN egress points, consider them methods for subverting region-restrictions, and thus won't serve ANY data to you. Netflix does this w/ PIA (and probably others) for instance.
