Home VPN Server - What Hardware Specs Do I Need?

I am trying to set up a home VPN server so that I can securely connect to the internet and stream movies or course lectures when I am traveling and using hotel/public wifi.

I know how to do this from a software perspective, but I don't know what kind of hardware specs I need for the computer that will serve as the VPN server. There will only be one client and I was going to use OpenVPN with AES 256 if that makes a difference. Since I'll be streaming media, it'll be doing a lot of simultaneous downloading and uploading, but I have a fast connection in both directions at home.

I read that a Raspberry Pi can do this, but that it'll be slow. Can someone recommend hardware that'll work? Like will an intel computestick work well? I just want it to be firstly fast and secondly not ridiculously expensive.

 

What kind of modem/router you have at home?

With some luck it might have vpn server that just needs activation.

 

It's a shared building router so I don't think I could use the existing one

 

Do you have public IP then?

To keep things simple, I would just use a router of my own that has VPN server.

However it is not that simple if your IP isn't reachable from the outside world, that applies to pretty much any simple solution you could use at home.

 

I have a Zyxel NSA310 that runs debian with an openvpn server. It isn't a bottleneck.

Most decent routers have some sort of VPN ability, especially if they can be flashed with custom firmware like openwrt.

Keep in mind that if you don't have access to the router, you won't be able to forward the necessary ports to make a VPN.

 

I use RPi2 running SoftEther, it does penetrate NATs as advertised and is very straightforward and fast. Tried tinc and OpenVPN before, they're nowhere near as good. OpenVPN is slow, not RPi. Want to make my RPi2 a router and NAS as well, as soon as I find a really good Wi-Fi adapter.