Grant me your knowledge of home use VPN’s

I currently don't use one. Should i?  Discuss please. 

I would say highly recommended when taking your machines for use on public WiFi such as airports, crapbucks, etc 

VPNs are useful in the home for tricking streaming services into allowing content from other countries.

You should be running a VPN anytime you're on a public Wifi network to protect yourself from bad actors. If you're running one at home, you're probably trying to get away with something ;)

I've been using Private Internet Access for years and been quite happy with it. It's a fairly well-known service and the streamers do know what it is, so things like Netflix don't always work when you're using a PIA address - this is to prevent Grtechguy from accessing the different programs only available outside the US :) But the downside is that if you're at a hotel and trying to keep snoopers out of your bizness, you may get locked out of Netflix.

A solution there, if your hotel room is of the right age to have a wired ethernet jack, is to bring along your own access point so you have a private Wifi connection.

What are you trying to protect against?

If you're tyring to protect yourself against your home ISP for whatever reason, you'll put your trust into the VPN provider instead. Not sure if that is that much of an improvement . You're likely better off running something like a Pi-Hole for DNS filtering to make things a little bit safer, and maybe use several different upstream DNS servers that are not your ISP's so they'll end up with a little less monetisable data.

If you're on the road, then yes, you probably want to have a VPN for connections from hotel rooms and other public WiFi access points. I "built" my own using a recent tool called WireGuard - it's a little bit more effort to do so, and it might or might not be a little cheaper than a commercial VPN. The main effort is/was to set up and maintain a server somewhere - if that's up your alleyway, I'd look into that approach.

Neither of these approaches is going to keeping three letter agencies at bay .

I used to travel a bit.  My company has good protection for their work assets, but I'm thinking about my personal ones.  I understand the government will roll anyone, but I'd rather just a little more protection..  Thats all.. nothing nefarious.. 

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :

I agree, for travel it's probably a good idea. I think some of the browser vendors are also offering VPNs, that might be something to look into.

If you're Linux/Unix literate, it's not that hard to put a VPN endpoint up for you to connect to. I've blogged about that in the past, if you're interested in that I can drop some links into a post later today.

Do get one, don't get surfshark. 
It is all but useless to me. Only connects to the net 50% of the time, only has useful speeds 15% of THAT time. 

Looks like Nord VPN is running a sale today.  

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :

I think they're running one most of the time.

In reply to BoxheadTim (Forum Supporter) :

that seems like it..   Still double the price of PIA.. 

Should you? Probably not for everyday uses. NordVPN doesn't tell you this, but their marketing takes place in a fictional universe where HTTPS doesn't exist and isn't incredibly popular, and credit card numbers, passwords etc. are sent over the Internet in plaintext. In the real world, no legit business will accept your credit card numbers in plaintext and few to no websites will accept logins in plaintext either. So the idea of shadowy interlopers seeing this personal information when you're on public wifi is a marketing lie from a company trying to sell you something you probably have no real use for. They were sued for this in the UK and had to stop running those ads there. If you use a VPN not set up by yourself, you're also putting more trust in the VPN provider by routing all your traffic through them - there are lots of sketchy Chinese VPN providers out there you should trust even less than your ISP.

VPNs do still have uses though. They can slightly enhance your privacy from ISPs that are allowed to snoop on your traffic (such as all ISPs in the US) to see which domain names you're visiting and snoop on your DNS lookups (which gives a little more detail on the same - using DNS over HTTPS can also protect this traffic). They're useful for working around geoblocking, or ISP/national level site blocking where those exist. If you have SRS BZNS security needs the extra layer of protection a VPN offers is good to have. If you set up your own VPN, it can give you convenient and secure access back to a LAN.

GameboyRMH said:

 If you use a VPN not set up by yourself, you're also putting more trust in the VPN provider by routing all your traffic through them - there are lots of sketchy Chinese VPN providers out there you should trust even less than your ISP.

This is the key point many potential customers seem to miss.  I have a friend that has tried to ask/talk to me about VPN's several times and I think he continues to miss this core concept.  I use a VPN for work all the time and it makes sense for connecting to a secure LAN, but I think most users completely miss that you don't necessarily get more security for your web interactions if you don't control the endpoint you are connecting to.

I've been happy using ExpressVPN for last 3 years, only on public WiFi, not from home.