Yeah, shudder to think how you would live on $50,000 in SF. That’s definitely three roommates territory

Higher end? You must not have been passing attention to the developer salaries in AI. $150,000 is median developer salary in SF bay area. You really need $100,000 just to support your family here

Higher end is seven figures

It’s really up to you

You only need to change when the censor tags your IP as sus. If you already mask well enough it looks like you’re just another server for a website

You can forward your VPS traffic through WARP. Most of those websites allow accelerators

Already outlawed in many places, but you can still just buy your own VPS in another country

Not really, you can masquerade as another website which looks plausible to censors

Not working in China most of the time

New new internet

Yes, they actually block legitimate websites too, apparently

It does matter.

When I connect to my VPN, the network sees that the server name is yahoo.com

It actually connects to my server which sends the request to yahoo.com and then replies with the cert. So the network sees that yahoo.com sent the cert back to my client from that IP address

Then there is a bunch of encrypted communication with timings and sizes that look like I’m downloading stuff over http.

I’d like to hear a credible model of blocking this

Xray-core is the one you want, very hard to block

Because if you’re roaming it creates a VPN, basically through the Chinese network

But it you want a lot of data, like for YouTube, you’re not going to want to pay roaming rates

So, not resistant to blocking

Use xray. I suggest the REALITY + XHTTP setup where you look like another h2 server

You can docker compose your panel for managing your server, get a free subdomain from afraid.org and set up tls on it

I use the v2rayng mobile app since I don’t switch servers much, I only have two

Wireguard is not resistant to blocking, it is plain as day if you’re using wireguard and china had blocked it for years

Doesn’t work in China, can be easily blocked by censors

With a name like simplex it’s a matter of time before it goes viral

How does one even deal with that

Self host xray, it works fine in China

https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core/

I recommend a REALITY set up where you mask yourself as a more popular site