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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

All of this can be achieved through a person VPN rather than a commercial subscription one by ssh -D whateverPort user@ip_address and setting up a SOCKS proxy in Firefox on that same port.

>there are often posts which criticize the use of a VPN

Often they specifically critique the likes of NordVPN etc. The off the shelf solutions rather than personally setup VPNs. What disgusts me is that they charge fees that are multiples of what it costs to run a basic Linode or DO Droplet for a month and a virtual machine is far more useful than a commercial VPN.

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I agree with this completely. However, in this particular instance, I could make an argument for using – or at least subscribing to – Mozilla VPN simply as a method of supporting the organization. It's vital that Mozilla maintains a strong engineering force counteracting monopolies who push loss-leading products to capture markets like web browsing and email.

You don't have to even use it, but every dollar of revenue that Mozilla can attribute to their privacy products and services means one less dollar is needed from their hostage deal with Google.

A basic droplet is $5 this is $7 dollars plus it gives you email relay.

If you already have a droplet unused sure but otherwise being able to change ip in different countries adds some additional value for 2 dollars more.

I used to self-host VPN on different public clouds but most of the time got many captcha challenges (even banned, depends on websites/CDN) and I gave up, then switched to Mullvad the captcha challenges reduces a lot.

That's the premium you pay for not having to deal with hosting and configuration. There are plenty of people - even in the tech community - who lack the knowledge to handle this themselves.

A personal VPN hides my "True IP", but it doesn't mix my traffic with thousands of others and shift that ip randomly over a few days.

That's the great, albiet unfortunate, value of retail VPNs; other people are using them and your traffic mixed with theirs. Being a totally anonymous but unique individual is less valuable in today's marketing morass is less valuable than being one of many in a VPNs IP space.

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