For me i prefer VPNs but lately cyber investigators or even other hackers focus on VPNs to capture there victims “Talking about the dark web hackers here”
What do you think about that?
Safest way too go about “OpSec” is layers. Me personally I used to run VPN + 3 or 4 GRE Tunnels with a PIA socks 5 as the exit or you could use a tor node but I needed speed. If you dont have the funds to buy a couple dedicated servers for GRE tunnels. A VPN+Socks5 would be fine tbh
I would say that a VPN would be safer however I think another good precaution would be to add layers. However using SSH is also a good safe solution. I would say that both work but, I would still stick with the VPN.