Proton VPN

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Do not build this. Shared addresses across many countries is the product, and running your own gives you the opposite.

A VPN on your own server means every site you visit sees an address used by exactly one person: you. That is worse for privacy than your home connection in some respects, because it is a stable identifier nobody else shares. The value of a commercial VPN is that thousands of people leave through the same address.

WHAT EACH ONE IS ACTUALLY FOR
- **A commercial VPN** hides your traffic from your network and your provider, and mixes you with other users. Useful on public wifi, and for appearing to be somewhere else
- **Your own VPN** gives you a private path into your own network from anywhere. Different problem, and genuinely worth building
- They are not substitutes, and conflating them is the mistake this verdict exists to prevent

WHAT YOU SHOULD BUILD

**A private network for your own machines**, which is one of the most useful weekends available:
- WireGuard between your devices and your server. A modern, small, fast protocol with an excellent implementation
- Or Tailscale's free tier, which handles the awkward part — NAT traversal — and is covered elsewhere in this catalogue
- Then your services need no public exposure at all: the media server, the notes, the dashboards, all reachable only from your own devices
- That single change removes more risk than any amount of hardening, because a service nobody can reach is a service nobody can attack

WHAT TO CHECK ABOUT A COMMERCIAL PROVIDER
- Where it is based, what it logs, and whether that claim has been audited or tested in court. Every provider says they keep no logs; a few have had it demonstrated
- Whether it is genuinely funded by subscriptions. A free VPN is selling something, and it is your traffic

THE HONEST NOTE
A VPN moves your traffic's exit point. It does not make you anonymous, it does not stop a site recognising you when you are signed in, and it does not replace the browser settings that actually reduce tracking.

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
Keep the commercial one for public wifi. Build WireGuard for your own machines — that is a different job and it is the more useful one.