There's an easy script written by Lin Song that sets up an IPSec VPN server that you can run to create a VPN on an Ubuntu instance and then connect to it from your desktop machine, giving you access to the servers in your control panel without them needing a public IP.
The script was written and hosted at https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn, but we've cloned it to ensure it's always available, so we'll use Civo's clone. Launch a new Extra Small (it doesn't need much in the way of resources) instance on Civo, running Ubuntu 16.04, choose to use root as the default username and either a password or SSH key (but it doesn't matter which for these purposes). SSH to the instance and run:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/civo/setup-ipsec-vpn/master/vpnsetup.sh \
-O vpnsetup.sh && sudo sh vpnsetup.sh
It will then install and configure everything it needs to run a VPN server. At the end it will give you your credentials to be able to connect to it. Something like:
IPsec VPN server is now ready for use!
Connect to your new VPN with these details:
Server IP: ip.add.ress.here
IPsec PSK: SOME_RANDOM_KEY
Username: vpnuser
Password: SOME_PASSWORD
Write these down. You'll need them to connect!
It also gives a couple of links on setting up clients, but it should be easy enough to just find instructions for setting up an "L2TP over IPSec" VPN connection. For macOS, this is just a standard VPN within the Network preferences. The only thing to be careful of is that you'll need to check the box that says "Send all traffic over VPN connection", otherwise your computer won't be able to route to the instances in your network.
