I run a commercial VPN service (Windscribe). Here are my thoughts on this.<p>At its core, a basic VPN is a trust shift service, nothing more. Do you trust your ISP less than an some anonymous shell company owned by Siberian forest dwellers? In many cases, the answer is no.<p>That being said, depending on where you are and if you choose the "right" VPN, the answer could be yes. Here are some reasons why you may want to use a good commercial VPN, which goes beyond just the ability to tunnel your traffic through a remote endpoint:<p>- You are in Russia, China, Iran or other countries with heavily censored Internet. Over 3 billion people live in such places, or nearly 50% of the world's population.<p>- If you don't live in such places, laws in certain US states criminalize certain behaviors. This will only get worse, even in "western democracies". Using a quality VPN service is much better than barebacking the Internet.<p>- You want your traffic to be "lost in the crowd", something you cannot achieve with your Digital Ocean droplet, no matter how well you configure it. Changing your IP does absolutely nothing, safe a few exceptions (piracy, or keeping an alter ego if your opsec is good)<p>- Additional features: server side DNS filtering / blocking. Yes you can use uBlock origin, but not on mobile, and not outside the browser. Yes you can run Pi-Hole, and setup WG tunnels to your homelab. 99% of people won't.<p>- Advanced features: Companion browser extensions that block ads, trackers, malicious domains, mess with your browser settings to reduce chances of fingerprinting. Yes you can install 5+ different extensions to do that. Most people won't.<p>TLDR; If you're an elite haxor, you can do everything yourself. You will spend time, and money doing so. Most people will not bother or not be able to do these things, and a quality commercial VPN service can check a lot of the boxes I mentioned above. Just avoid the ones that advertise heavily, those are marketing / snakeoil sales companies, as the author suggested.