How to create users for your OpenVPN server with OVPN-Admin

Creating an additional user for an OpenVPN server for each connected device is generally considered good practice as having too many devices all running on the same IP can result in traffic congestion.

The process itself is extremely straightforward and is very user-friendly so you should not worry if you do not have any prior technical experience. For this tutorial we are going to be using OVPN-Admin, so let’s dive right into it!

Step 1: Find your login credentials

Your provider will send you your first user profile in the form of a ‘.ovpn’ file as well as additional information related to your VPN server. It is important to save this information as you will need it in order to get access to your server’s control panel, which is the place from which you can add new users.

Step 2: Navigating to the server control panel

In order to reach your server’s control panel, there are a couple of easy steps that you need to follow. First, locate your server’s IP address - it is a sequence of numbers separated by dots.

Once you have found it, copy and paste it into your web browser of choice. Next, you need to place a colon after it, followed by the port that you have also been sent at the end. The whole sequence should look similar to the following image:

After that simply click ‘Enter’ and a popup window will appear requesting your login details (in which case you can skip over the next couple of paragraphs and go directly to step 3).

However, most browsers will redirect you to an error page, stating that the destination website is untrusted. This happens because your operating system does not recognize the VPN server as a viable and trusted connection as you are trying to access it from the browser. However, you should not worry about this message in this particular case. To continue to your server click on the ‘Advanced’ button as illustrated below:

This will bring up an additional message. Click on the ‘Proceed to…’ button at the bottom of the page as highlighted by the following image:

Next, a small popup window will appear that will request your login details. You will need to fill in both your username and password. Simply copy and paste them into their corresponding fields and click ‘Login’ or hit ‘Enter’ from your keyboard.

You will now be logged into your OVPN-Admin control panel, which will look like so:

Step 3: Creating a new user

This is the place from where you can manage your users including adding new ones, removing outdated profiles as well editing existing ones. To create a new user profile simply click on the green ‘Add user’ button, highlighted by the image below:

This will bring up a new window, requiring you to give a name to your new user. After that, simply click on ‘Create’ and you will successfully create the new profile.

Your new user profile will now appear at the bottom of the users table in your control panel just like so:

To download your newly created user profile all you have to do is to just click on the ‘Download config’ button as seen in the following image:

This will download your user profile as a ‘.ovpn’ file, which you can then import to the OpenVPN client on your desired device to establish a connection. That’s it! You can now successfully create new user profiles for a VPN server.