Ok, well fuck NordVPN. Can someone recommend something good that doesn't log, without setting up my own entire VPN (yes I get its the only way to be sure blah blah blah. I definitely care, but not enough to waste a week doing all that)
You might look into AirVPN, they have a strong no-log policy, independent ownership, transparent list of all servers/load, guaranteed minimum bandwidth, up 10 (iirc) port forwards with optional dynamicDNS, p2p welcome. Current Black Friday price is 64 EUR for 3yr which is much less than Nord's "deal" which looks like their usual price to me--and crypto is accepted. They also financially support various projects such as Tor, EFF, and host some open-source mirrors.
No, we have never used IPs or servers from them (this is publicly verifiable as our VPN IPs are public), and have no business connection with them today. Verified by Mozilla and the European Commission as well when they audited ProtonVPN, details here: https://protonvpn.com/blog/is-protonvpn-trustworthy/
if you're wasting a week doing it, I'm fairly confident that you are doing something wrong. I set up an internal VPN on my home network for ad blocking purposes (cf. Pi-hole) and it literally took less than an hour, despite that being the first time I had ever really done such a thing.
I think maybe you just need the right guide, or even something like the ansible playbook someone mentioned in a different comment that can just automate the process for you
I'm being super dramatic, even if it takes 1 hour the last thing I want is yet another server login floating around. If I were doing some serious stuff, I would do it, but I really use a VPN only when I'm at coffee shops and stuff to prevent random nonsense. I use a VPN to completely hide my tracks etc. With that said, I don't want my data to be sold to tensornet or whatever that crap company is called
oh that makes sense. my apologies, I am not particularly good at picking up on subtext on the internet. I personally don't really use a VPN at all, no particular need to since I personally believe that online privacy is an illusion that the government and corporations created to have a problem they could market a solution for. Perhaps a little tinfoil hat-y but I'm entirely convinced that there's no amount of encryption or misdirection that nation state level intelligence agencies with absurdly high budgets (and likely the collaboration of other intelligence agencies) could not reverse engineer or work around.
