Hey all,
I’ve been using a commercial VPN for years on my mobile devices and home PCs. Recently I’ve started to use Tailscale and realized I can easily create a self-hosted VPN on a cheap VPS with unlimited traffic.
But I’m not really sure if that’s what I need. BTW, I’m not doing anything dangerous, no torrents, no illegal stuff, no journalism or whistleblowing, not even looking up abortion clinics. I just hate mass surveillance and I don’t want to be constantly profiled.
Commercial VPN allows to “hide in a crowd” by sharing IP with thousands of other clients. But there are a few issues:
- Often sites blacklist VPN IPs, so I can’t get in or pass captcha
- Performance is not very good
- I have to trust VPN to not keep the logs and not sell data. I used Mullvad and they are considered reliable, but you never know until it’s too late
With self-hosted VPN, I’m losing benefit of “hiding in crowd” as my VPN will be used only by me and maybe a couple of other people. My understanding is that my VPS outgoing traffic is from static server IP. So if I login to Facebook once, the address is associated with me. I’ll also have to trust VPS provider to not analyze my traffic and sell it. On other hand, I’m still protected from my ISP spying, from exposing my real IP address to web sites, from dangers of public WiFi networks. And I might get better performance for about the same price.
What’s your take on VPNs? Tell me if you are using self-hosted VPN and why.
I use self hosted VPN for many years now.
You worry that facebook would associate that static ip with you but the problem is quiet the opposite.
most website will recognize that your IP belong to a hosting company so they often suspect that you are a bot. Wikipedia wont let u edit articls, youtube wont let u comment on videos. Other than that its fine, just expect to pass more captcha.
you could pay little extra and get dynamic IP from your provider. That effectivwly changes your IP. Deleting dynamic IP and recreating it gives u a new one. But I dont do that.
I just hide in the crowed by letting others uss my VPN and rely on service providers often dismissing my IP as bot
Tor network could always use more obfuscation.
Exactly. Even for mobile use besides accessing your home resources you can avoid your cellular provider monitoring/hijacking your traffic.
Of course self hosting means you’re still sending that info from your home network over your ISP.
So it’s a trade off there but depending on your ISP vs your cellular network makes sense.
I route through my server or my home router when using public WiFi and stuff. I don’t care too much about the privacy aspect, my real identity is attached to my server and domain anyway. I even have rDNS configured, there’s no hiding who the IP belongs to.
That said, server providers are much less likely to analyze your traffic because that’d be a big no-no for a lot of companies using those servers. And of course any given request may actually be from any of Lemmy, Mastodon, IRC bots or Matrix, so pings to weird sites can result entirely from someone posting that link somewhere.
And it does have the advantage that if you try to DDoS that IP you’ll be very unsuccessful.
