Recently purchased an Ubiquity EdgeRouter Lite, a fast wired router which runs Linux. It was a bit of an impulse buy, but a friend of mine convinced me it would be worth it, and it is pretty cheap. The router runs a proprietary version of Debian Linux maintained by Ubiquity called EdgeOS. It has a close open source cousin called VyOS.
My old router, an Asus RT-N66 was no slouch, but I wasn’t able to get full download speeds at home. I thought it was my service, but it was actually my router not able to handle those speeds. I pay for 150mb down, but was only able to get about 100mb with the Asus, with the EdgeRouter I get full 150mb down on my wired computers. The cost of the EdgeRouter Lite? Only 90$.
Before Speed using Asus Router
After Speed using EdgeRouter lite
The EdgeRouter’s drawback is that it requires IT level skills to configure. Even though they provide a web interface, it requires a lot of googling to figure out how just set up a dhcp router, something you can do with a few clicks on the Asus. I consider myself pretty tech saavy, but it took me several hours to figure that out, and several days more to get an OpenVPN server running. Overall its nice to have such a powerful and fast router on the network, it works very well despite the steep learning curve.
Dev Notes 
Great content – thanks for taking time to post it!! Easy to understand writing style.
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Thanks for the information which is very useful. I have the ER-X router. I was wondering if you have any advice. Default is that eth0 which is used for console and internet connection. I like to setup the internet through eth0, if i did that I could figure out of logging in on say eth3 and then i can try setup what you are doing. I recall you mentioning that all ports are stand alone ports so I am trying to figure out a way to login on a different port when eth0 to log is connect to my ISP router.
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