Tailscale would work as another user said. You could run TOR too. I’ve got a TOR service that I can SSH into for “plan b” if my VPN is down. It doesn’t need port forwarding.

They want your IP or your phone. Use a VPN IP or TOR and they’ll require a phone number. That’s been my experience at least. I don’t trust them.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-34158

Maybe Picoshare

I’d recommend pihole->dnscrypt->mullvads DNS server.

100%, like you said, email isn’t really made for private communications. Even with me calling it out as not private, I do use fastmail as my main provider and like it.

It’s great except it’s hosted in Australia. Not really privacy focused.

I don’t trust NordVPN. There was a lot of shady behavior by that company.

E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/wnpmln/i_think_nordvpn_is_creating_fake_accounts_and/

Move the ports you are exposing from the qbit container to the wireguard container. The VPN container should be the only one exposing ports in this case.

But like someone else said, the gluetun image works really well for this.