A vpn to my home country to get around geoblocking. The best television there is the public broadcaster and free to stream but geoblocked outside Australia.
I setup an old router on the home side so switching on the vpn is just changing the wifi.
The reason to use a $3 vps rather than a dedicated vpn: the dedicated vpn services get blocked since geoblocking knows the big vpn providers, they don’t always have a config for your routers supported vpn types which ai can setup for you in seconds, the dedicated server can do a ton more for you when you need it too (eg. All the other stuff listed here).
so you've basically spun up your own personal VPN.
Makes sense for all the reasons you stated. Curious - would this have been doable for a non technical person pre LLM ?
Yes - Tailscale packages it up nicely and they even have an apple TV app.