Yo ho me hearties,
I was reading through Servarr wiki’s VPN Guide and saw this callout:
For most users, secure DNS is sufficient instead of VPNs and fixes indexer connectivity issues without the complexity and problems of VPN setups
Are VPNs no longer the recommended practice? I was under the impression a VPN was pretty much required for sharing stuff in a copyright-sensitive country. I’d be delighted if I could simplify my app stack.
I still use one with Usenet, because why not.
Worse performance, not everything works, and depending on the country you live in and which VPN provider you pick a VPN can actually be a downgrade in privacy since a second commercial entity now has the ability to look at all your traffic and distil valuable data from it to sell. The better VPN providers say they don’t do this (and some probably don’t) but a lot of them will definitely do so.
If the traffic is already encrypted, then it shouldn’t matter that your VPN provider can see it.
I agree about performance, but for my *arr stack it’s not something I care about too much since I’m never actively waiting on a download to complete.