How does a self hosted VPN actually do anything? I was under the impression that VPNs had to be off-site to give the benefits of, say, location spoofing.

It wouldn’t do anything for the concerns you have. You want to avoid trouble for torrenting and avoid government internet censorship.

If you’re at work, where the government censors your internet access, it wouldn’t help you to route your connection through your home, where the government censors your internet access.

If you’re at home, worried a rights holder will join a swarm and clock the ip you’re downloading from, routing your traffic through a self hosted vpn on a vps you pay for which conforms to kyc laws isn’t going to prevent them from clocking an ip that goes to you on paper. Vps operators are not going to stand on business for you either just from my experience.

A self hosted vpn would allow you to dial into your home network and watch tv off your jellyfin when you’re at work though. Or ssh into your computers from the other side of the country.

Do I need to pay any subscriptions to other services for a self hosted VPN? At least in order to access features such as location spoofing.

Location spoofing comes from having your actual connection actually routed through an actual server in the actual location you’re spoofing from. When I want to stream Thomas the tank engine in the original localization and I set my mullvad connection to gb-glw-wg-002 my computers uplink to the internet actually goes through mullvads second WireGuard server in Glasgow, Great Britain before it asks for dns, etc. so when I pull up Thomas, the Netflix or whatever says “oi! ‘Es go’ a loicense f’ this ‘ere bad English!” And gives me the option of watching the banned in the us episodes where the gang has to avoid a diddler train that lurks in a tunnel.

If you were to self host, you’d need to maintain vpses in every place you wanna be from.

We use Cloudflare WARP at work to access internal services. Will a LAN-VPN Fuck this up even if I explicitly avoid spoofing my location to ensure my IT guy doesnt shit a brick?

Yes you will stand out.

It’s also expensive to rent unmetered vpses. Do your own research but you need to be below $5 a month to beat mullvad in price and below $3 to beat air.

And then you have to spend your time actually doing the setup and administration of the vpn on the vps.

And you’re not even laundering your traffic with everyone else coming out of there either, so there’s that.

The solution to your problem is a vpn service or two.

You want port forwarding on your vpn for torrenting and you want at least a decently paranoiac coded service for privacy.

People who pay for one vpn service to solve the problem you have use proton. It’s about eight bucks a month and you get port forwarding and it’s kinda okay for paranoia and privacy.

People who pay for two vpn services to solve the problem you have use mullvad for privacy and air or something for torrenting. It comes out to about eight bucks a month.