VPN’s are useful in keeping the ISP’s out of your business from snooping on all your websites that you visit, and all the traffic coming and going from your PC

A VPN isn’t a miracle cure-all. You are just transferring all your traffic from your local ISP to another. Usually the new one is by choice, so there is a lot more competition and thus more likely a better service provided.

VPN’s allow pirates to download torrented media, without advertisements, to be enjoyed offline, which streaming doesn’t always do.

Just for clearity, its not the VPN that’s enables this. /Some/ VPNs allow for this, and you have to do your due diligence or else you could just be handing all your data straight into a honeypot. VPN providers are rife with paid shills and bad actors.

Not picking on you specifically, but I’d hate to see a fresh recruit find some rando VPN from a youtube ad and think they’re in international waters when they’re really standing on dry land.

Totally, you can easy do *.test.yourdomain.com and that’s works just fine for certbot. Ive never used cloudflare so I’d assume the same setup should work.

Last I checked, a wild card cert for *.yourdomain.com is NOT valid for test.local.yourdomain.com, but IS valid for test.yourdomain.com. Wildcard certs are not recursive as far as I know.