If you are going to selfhost your vpn then you are going to “hide” behind your vpns ip, which probably leads to you anyway. VPN services are often contacted by authorities and why they work is because they refuse to disclose the information.

Because it is connected to your own ISP and it has the same location as you have (if you set it up at yout home). And sharing your own IP to internet.

Basically using self hosted VPN in same location is same as not using VPN as you are exposing same IP to the internet.

VPN doesn’t hide IP, it just routes your traffic to internet via VPN server (and exposes that IP to the internet).

If you’re on the same network it does literally nothing.

If you mean on a VPS, you might have to pay for the high bandwidth and they might monitor your traffic and blacklist you.

Everyone here is correct that what your thinking wont work and let me clarify why. When you torrent something the IP address used to download content is shared with everyone in the pool. You get caught when companies or 3rd parties trying to enforce copyright are in that pool and record every IP. So however you download the content, the front facing IP needs to be with an ISP that doesn’t give a fuck about copyright, usually another jurisdiction with lacks copyright infringement laws. If you host a VPN at your house your still using the same ISP which will still bring either a letter or shutdown of service.

It is not, since your home IP address will show up just like you were using QBittorrent on your computer. VPN by itself just allows you to access a network somewhere else.

The main point of paying for a VPN service is that it is not located in your home network. If you don’t want to use subscription services you could look for a lifetime deal on the internet (got one for Windscribe myself).

A better option might be pirating over i2p but I have not tried that yet.

Your self-hosted VPN has to be plugged into the internet somewhere. If that IP address is associated with you, the VPN hasn’t done anything.

The number of people who are using the VPN server also lends plausible deniability.
“No I wasn’t pirating anything! That was someone else! I was just using it because I like my privacy and don’t trust my government to not snoop on it!”

Yes, but you have to keep in mind part of the point of the VPN is so that it’s not running on your home network and exposing your home IP. Having an RPI or laptop running OpenVPN server from your home isn’t going to help you in terms of privacy when you’re just exposing your home IP. Also, running your own VPN means you will have a dedicated IP which will be tied to you versus running a commercial VPN which would have shared IPs (but likely wouldn’t offer port-forwarding so it would be worthless for seedboxes).

What I do on mine is rent a cheap VPS with unlimited bandwidth, I run OpenVPN server on that VPS using Nyr’s openvpn-install script and then on my local seedbox server I connect to my OpenVPN server. I have qbittorrent-nox listening on the tun0 interface on my local seedbox, and then on my OpenVPN server VPS I have an iptables prerouting rule to route traffic from the inbound torrent port to my local seedbox server.

It works very well for me, even though I only use private trackers so it’s overkill in my case.

If you’re self hosting a VPN and using it from within the same network there’s not really much point because externally it’s going to be the same thing.

It’s handy for cases where you want to access your home network from outside but pointless if you’re seafaring.

The point of a VPN while torrenting is to remove the direct link between your home IP and the one that’s actually torrenting.

A VPN (the type you see advertised everywhere) is just a tunnel between two devices. Data goes (encrypted) out one device, to the other, gets decrypted, and sent off to its actual destination. This way, to anyone who doesn’t keep a close eye on this chain (everyone except you, the VPN company, and a government potentially spying on the VPN company) it looks like the source of the data is the other device in the VPN (usually some host owned by the VPN provider).

This uses a different public IP than your home address, and is only tracable back to the VPN company for any external entities. This includes the companies tracking the use of torrents and submitting claims to your ISP of your torrenting.

If you host a VPN at home, the traffic just goes from your device to your VPN server (laptop or rpi), and then out to its destination, which will all still be from your home IP.

Even hosting one yourself externally, there will likely be some government trackable name or purchasing info associated with where you’re hosting it. Even if not, there’s only your IP connecting to it, and then regular internet traffic (or torrents) going out. The only way to mask this is to use a truly private, pre-hosted VPN.

Mullvad is decent for privacy, and although other services perform the same task (NordVPN, Proton, etc), they are all less trustworthy in many ways. NordVPN is especially one to avoid.

Since most of these VPN providers operate with a monthly subscription, it will be hard to avoid.

You can set up a “self hosted” VPN on a cloud service like Linode but you still would have to pay for their service which is $5 US a month for 1TB of traffic. the advantage is that you can make sure there are no logs and once it’s setup it’s fairly maintenance free. This guide is a bit older but i used back then which worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxpX_mubz2A&t=685s. PS i don’t use it anymore but would if my situation changes.

edited to add “self hosted”