this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Self-hosting
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Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
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Ah, gotcha.
So... You generally have to pay a VPN company to get access to their VPN exit nodes, and "hide" in among all the other traffic.
There is nothing you can self-host to do that.
ProtonVPN used to be a popular recommendation, however they are slipping out of favour due to behaviour over the last couple of years.
If you are looking for a VPN for anonymity, be careful of "review" articles posted on blogs owned by dodgy VPN providers.
I'm not sure who the "go to" VPN provider is these days.
If you rent a VPS (virtual private server) in order to run your own VPN exit node, and the VPS provider gets a letter regarding illegal activity, then your VPS will be deleted.
I don't know of a VPS provider that will protect customers privacy WRT legal requests (maybe there are, but they will be exceptionally expensive).
So everyone pays a VPN provider that doesn't keep logs in order to hide amongst the herd.
In order to make sure that your file downloading system uses a VPN instead of the default gateway for internet access is a huge field.
So you need to describe exactly the software you want to use the VPN exit node, and how it's installed.
Because the solution could be host firewall, docker networking, isolated networks.... Pretty sure there are many others.
So, I already pay for Proton VPN, mostly for the E-Mail, but I do use the vpn currently on my main PC to torrent, which I then manually transfer to my server over the network, but I would like to eliminate the middleman and torrent directly to the server, while still being able to easily remote in. I run CasaOS on my Homelab and I was planning on installing qbittorrent in a container, probably through Portainer. I'm already running Soulseek on the server the same way (originally I was running slskd, but it was overly complicated to set up and once it was set up and working there were lots of upload errors and I didn't like the UI, so I changed to a Nicontine+ docker), but that's just open to the web.
I went through the same thought process as you a while ago, also with CasaOS. I ended up using the *arr suite, Jellyseer and then this container via Portainer https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/. All the instructions are on there for whichever provider you go with, and all it took was making sure the env variables and permissions were in the right place.
Thanks for the recommendation. Once I found the "n" I mistyped as "m" in one of the file directories it actually went quite well. I looked at setting up sonarr & radarr, but its really just me and my partner using it right now, so I'll put that on the back burner until I get more storage.