Comment by 0xbadcafebee
8 hours ago
Fastmail is fine. It's somewhat limited in its UX, but technically speaking, everything works, and it's snappy. Very few outages. I really like their integrations with calendars, contacts, and mail for 3rd party sites/services. Not a ton of features or deals re: custom domains or multiple users, but it's fine if it's just for yourself. edit They literally -JUST- turned on Offline support for their app and web interface, so my only real complaint is gone. Go with Fastmail.
For a VPN, what do you need it to do? For tinfoil hat privacy stuff, get a VPS in Estonia or something. If you just want a secure tunnel while working remote, get a WiFi access point with Wireguard and Dynamic DNS at your home (it's free plus you probably have more bandwidth).
Hey, what's the trick of keeping your VPS OS/etc updated and upgraded without having to nuke (or replace or copy to elsewhere and "paste" back) the current setup on that VPS? In all my self hosting attempts it works butter smooth until I try to update/upgrade my VPS OS or hell even the app I am using like a VPN, or a seedbox, a notes app etc etc. I mean it's been really painful. Sometimes I have used the VPS w/o updating for 3-4 years - no security/OS update - none. The moment I do that - bam! Everything broken or gone :(
But if you get a VPS your traffic will always be linked with a unique IP. VPNs have an advantage there.
Most providers will hand you a new IP if you suspend then restart your instance. That at least spreads you pool of IPs across their AS (or some subset of it). For the price of a "reputable" VPN service, you could run 2 or 3 low end VPSes from different providers. A bit of Ansible, Python (or language of your choice), and perhaps some browser automation if the cheap VPN provider doesn't have a usable API - should allow you to automate provisioning VPN endpoints and rotating IP addresses.
That would at least move your needle around a lot, even if it isn't bringing along the haystack of all the other VPN customers sharing their endpoint IP addresses. You couldn't consider this sufficient protection against TLAs or Mossad. Or disgruntled Magic The Gathering players burnt by MtGox...