A VPN aggregates many users' traffic under one ip, like what your home router does for all your devices. This is irritating, because other users doing shady stuff gets the ip flagged and then you get captchas and can't log into etsy and you bank and all that. A vps gets its own ip, so if you tunnel your traffic through it, you're not sharing the ip. So the ip doesn't get blacklisted and those hassles disappear. But it's also not as anonymous, because your traffic isn't bundled with any other traffic. VPS providers generally require some information, or at least payment, which can tie your identity to the ip. Then there are logs. You can log to null, if you set it up right, but the vps provider probably also keeps logs, so that's a negative compared with a VPN.

[–] nivenkos@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

You're also more likely to be limited on traffic or pay-per-traffic on VPSs though.

And if not, they might blacklist you for heavy usage anyway.

[–] nicman24@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

i think level1techs on yt covered it. it is basically a rented computer you can have for yourself. more importantly the traffic that goes through it is only your own so no captchas

[–] nivenkos@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Use something like vopono that lets you run just certain applications in the VPN - https://github.com/jamesmcm/vopono

Some VPN clients have this built in too.