I am currently running 2 shadowsocks servers over 1 year and they are working really great.
I followed this instruction
https://www.tipsforchina.com/how-to-setup-a-fast-shadowsocks-server-on-vultr-vps-the-easy-way.html
Most of vpns are blocked in china (PPTP, L2TP, OpenVPN) Try using IKev2, SSTP based VPNs