Element/Matrix is pretty much what you’re looking for if you need self hosted. Could also look into Jabber/XMPP or IRC but Matrix is going to be way more modern and useable.

The info given above is incorrect. Normally, you’d need to forward ports on your router, but if you’re on a VPN your router doesn’t come into play. The VPN creates a tunnel directly from your PC to the VPN provider’s server, and whatever ports are open from that server are then forwarded to you, assuming they’re allowing port forwarding.

I used Nord a couple years ago and didn’t renew after they were breached and failed to disclose it to their users. I then tried Mozilla, but it regularly crashed when torrenting too fast. Slowing my torrents down to under 100mbit worked but sucked when I have a gbit connection. Then a family member passed away with an active expressvpn account so I used it and it was pretty fast for normal browsing, and just as good as Nord and better than Mozilla for torrents.

Now that ExpressVPN is expired, I just switched to proton and HOLY COW it is so much faster for torrents. Just check the button for port forwarding, and you’ll be assigned a random port. Plug that into qBittorrent and you’ll connect and start downloading so much faster it’s insane. Also go into the advanced setting in qBittorrent and you can set it to only use the ProtonVPN network connection, then if proton disconnects, qBittorrent won’t keep downloading on your normal ISP connection.

It feels really weird to go to one website and enter my credentials for another website. How secure is that? I guess whatever app I’m using could be storing credentials instead of using an API, but the fact I can see a URL and enter the wrong creds from my password manager feels off.

How hard would it have been to just add another octet or two? I like using my 10key and if I have to type letters for an IP address it’s a bad system.

I have 15-20 domains with Google so it’ll be a pain to manage something else. Even if I can’t trust Google’s privacy or product continuity, I do trust Google’s security and have multi factor enabled already, so having my domains protected by them is a great thing. I’m pretty much always logged into my Google account on my PC so it’s one fewer account to manage.

Squarespace is probably fine, but I bought my first domains through a web builder and web host years ago and they slowly raised prices and reduced features until I had to leave them and moved to Google.