Cloudflare works really well and has a good UI. Namecheap also works well, but it takes more clicks to adjust DNS records.

Thank you for sharing this story. I’ve recently watched this video on MLMs and it describes exactly the kind of situations your mom found herself in. I thought these MLM schemes were bad before, but I had no idea just how horrible they actually are…

Do you find DDG to be slower than Bing or Google? A few years ago I thought there was a noticeable delay with DDG, but not with Google.

In general, I’d say it’s good enough. i5 might have more cores if you need them, but then i7 only gets you slightly higher frequency, which may not be worth the price.

Here is a thread with 4th July deals. On that forum you can often find deals for cheap, low-spec VPS.

live plex transcoding

If you need this, the most cost-efficient way is probably to get an Intel CPU with an integrated GPU that supports QuickSync (all recent ones do) and pay for the lifetime Plex Pass. In the long run, it’s cheaper than getting a beefier CPU, let alone a dedicated GPU, just for transcoding.

I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.

For what it’s worth, Bing is similarly full of ads, but with a more cluttered page design and a lot of video previews. Often times I find its suggestions for related searches get in the way of actually reading the search results for the current search…

I don’t like it because it has become very iPhone-like in the bad ways, meaning it takes several clicks to do simple, common tasks. I much prefer Samsung’s OneUI for how easily accessible everything is.

F-Droid is great! The official client is not the most user-friendly, but Droidify is a great alternative.

You can also look at Obtanium to download binaries straight from the applications’ developers instead of those built by F-Droid.