Most people using a VPN think they’re being smart about privacy.
They’re not wrong. But my reason for getting one had nothing to do with privacy - at least not at first. It started when my country began randomly blocking websites. It started with Chinese apps like TikTok, then tools like Linktree, then this year Supabase got temporarily banned for no apparent reason. I just wanted access to the tools I was already using.
That was the push. But over the years privacy has become something I actually care about, so it made sense to go deeper.
Now about commercial VPNs.
All they do is change who can see your data. Not whether your data is visible.
Right now, if you’re paying for a VPN app, you’ve gone from:
“My ISP can see everything” → “Some random company can see everything”
Everyone says “just use a VPN for privacy.” But the question nobody asks is who you’re actually trusting when you do that.
Now many of the biggest VPN brands are owned by Kape Technologies and this space is weirdly concentrated. Kape Technologies owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, and Intego. . It was founded by Israeli businessman Teddy Sagi, and has strong Israeli origins/connections.This is a company with a complex history and ties that are worth at least a Google.
You don’t have to believe anything shady is happening. You just have to ask whether you’ve actually thought about who’s on the other end of that tunnel.
So what’s the best move?
Run your own.
Why self-hosting beats any VPN app
The simple version:
- No company sitting in the middle
- No “we don’t log data, trust us bro”
- No weird ownership structures or silent acquisitions
You decide what gets logged - or nothing gets logged. And practically:
- Costs $3–10 a month
- Works on every device
- Takes about 20 minutes to set up once
But what are the actual downsides
Your VPS provider still sees metadata. You have to maintain it - updates, basic security. If the server goes down, your VPN goes down with it.
And the big one: one user, one IP. That’s easier to correlate than a shared pool of thousands. So no - this is not “I am invisible now.”
It’s just more control and less blind trust.
If that’s a lot, here’s good ones we still trust: Protonvpn
The setup
Step 1 - Rent a VPS A cloud server with a public IP. Pick any:
- Contabo
- DigitalOcean Around $5 a month.
Step 2 - Install WireGuard WireGuard is probably the main protocol you need to know for self-hosting a VPN today. It’s lightweight, fast, modern, and much simpler than older setups like OpenVPN. Use wg-easy, it’s Docker-based and gives you a dashboard, one-click client creation and QR codes for your phone.
The basic flow is:
rent a cheap VPS install WireGuard/wg-easy create a client profile scan the QR code in the WireGuard app and route your traffic through your own server
And if your goal is serious anonymity? That’s where tools like Tor and good opsec matter more.
Who this is actually for
This makes sense if you don’t want your ISP tracking everything, you don’t trust VPN companies and you want something cheap and predictable.
It doesn’t make you anonymous. But it puts you in control of your own traffic instead of handing it to a company whose business model you can’t verify.
No more “trust us bro.”
At some point the tools got simple enough that running your own just became the obvious choice.
