Could someone give me an overview of the pros and cons of the two options?
VPN service provider gives you anonymity without total control. Self hosting gives you total control without anonymity. That’s basically it.
Honestly, unless the point is just security when using public wifi networks, I can’t see a ton of advantages to the self-hosting route.
It’s really an apples-to-oranges comparison, you’re talking about two completely different things. The only thing these have in common are providing end-to-end encryption across unsecured Wifi and (potentially) allowing you to break out of a highly secured network (as others have mentioned, corporate networks that lock down internet access to ports 80/443). And they’re both called a “VPN”, which is really just a catch-all marketing phrase that doesn’t describe any details of the implementations.
Typically you run a VPN server on your home network to gain secure access to your LAN (file shares, RDP to a computer at home, etc.) and run a split tunnel so your non-VPN traffic goes out your internet/cellular connection. What you’re talking about requires sending all traffic through the tunnel, which will be limited by your home internet service upload speed. If you have the typical 3-10 Mbps upload speed that most residential broadband connections have, that’s basically your max VPN-connected download speed (well a little less because of encryption overhead).
As others have said, anonymity is part of what you pay for with a 3rd-party VPN provider. How the provider keeps you anonymous depends on the circumstances. Most have a “no-logs” policy that prevents tracing traffic back to you. A lot put you on a shared public IP with other users (which has notable disadvantages, particularly when the service is used by hackers and malicious users that get the IPs blocked on certain sites or blacklisted. The more expensive services will put you on a dedicated public IP). Some implement custom protocols that route bit torrent traffic to servers in localities that don’t recognize copyright laws (or require you connect directly to these servers if you want to be able to torrent). Running these kinds of things over your “self-hosted” VPN server will just send them out your normal home internet connection, so everything is still traceable back to you. The only anonymity you really gain is from whomever maintains the wifi network you’re on when you’re away from home (or your cellular provider).
Setting up a secure VPN server at home is not the easiest thing in the world if you don’t have a basic understanding of networking and encryption. If you want security features on par with a 3rd-party provider that would allow you to tunnel out of a restrictive Wifi network you need to set up a TLS-based VPN, which usually means OpenVPN or Microsoft SSTP (if you run Windows Server at home). OpenVPN can be pretty challenging to setup, SSTP slightly easier. Then you also need to purchase a DDNS (or a domain if you have a static public IP) that will allow you to issue a server certificate for. There’s more to it than that, but you probably get the idea, there isn’t really an out-of-the-box setup for this kind of thing.
Don’t get me wrong, setting up a VPN server at home can be a lot of fun, I’ve done a few of them. But there’s no comparison to just signing up with a VPN provider and downloading an app if you just want anonymous browsing and security/freedom with unsecured/restrictive wifi networks. Setting up your own VPN server is just a totally different thing that you want to have the desire to learn and tinker with.
You could host the vpn in a vps paid for with a card not tied to you if you really want anonymity. Can even do it for free, but the vps provider will still be able to see the traffic.
Could someone give me more info on how to do a self-hosted VPN?
I mean self hosted on my own hardware
Self hosted how? On a VPS? Hosting provider has your info so not much anonymity.
So, I pay with bitcoin anonymously, for my vps service. Hosting provider does not have my info or ID. Problem Solved ; -)
If you’re interested in learning how to host a VPN on a server here is a good place to start:
Digital Ocean - How To Set Up an OpenVPN Server on Ubuntu 16.04
it’s in my living room
Maybe you need specifiy the purpose of the VPN. If someone connects to your VPN, are they expecting internet access or just access to something on your network?
So there’s no real added privacy unless you’re using connecting to it from public wifi so that the public wifi won’t can’t sniff your connection.
Yes I’d like to give internet access to all devices. I hope with that mobile browsing privacy increases, but what I don’t know (among other things) is whether it would provide and advantage to local machines.
They’ll definitely have UDP 53 open too, unless you surf to all websites by memorized IP address :P.
That does happen, especially on captive portals, but I don’t see it very often.
I mean, everything worth a shit will be using https anyway?