this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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The majority of VPNs are self-hosted. The most common use cases for a VPN are things like connecting to an employer's network when working from home, or connecting to your home server when away from home.
Commercial VPNs that route all your traffic through them aren't the usual VPN use case. They've become common mostly because people don't know how to use proxies, and they make it easy to ensure everything is routed via the VPN. A lot of use cases that people use VPNs for could really be solved with proxies.
You still need someone else's computer. Making a cloudflare proxie or other cloud platform is useless and not secure, specially if you're torrenting or trying to hide your IP.
I'm pratically sure they even block the torrent protocol and do not allow port forwarding on most cloud VPS.
Yeah proxies are great, but only if you have somewhere to route your traffic.
A proxy is no less secure than a VPN, assuming it's using encryption like TLS. It's not as good for torrents since you can't port forward, but fundamentally people that use commercial VPNs are using then just like a proxy. Some providers like NordVPN do offer HTTPS proxies in addition to their VPN service.
A proxy operates on the application level; a VPN on the OS level. Both the VPN and the proxy are susceptible to OS-level threats. The proxy is also susceptible to application-level threats that the VPN is not. A misconfigured or exploited torrent client, for example, could ignore the proxy and expose your public IP. With a properly functioning VPN, that faulty application can only expose the public-facing end of the VPN tunnel.
You sure about that? I mean, to use a VPN your need some kind of application that could potentially be vulnerable or have some zero day exploits.
In contrary, a proxy is as simple as to forward your traffic to another computer through a SSH tunnel which doesn't specially need some kind of application but only relies on lower level package.
Maybe I misunderstood your comment but If I'm wrong I'm agear to learn something new.
A VPN can also have a faulty config. Everything depends on correct configs :)
TIL! Thanks!