look, dedicated ip vpns. i see them pushed hard by providers now but im struggling to think of a modern use case that isn't just paranoia. back in the day, sure, you needed one for secure email logins or maybe some old banking portal that freaked out over shared subnets. felt like a premium tool. i got curious and ran numbers on three big names for a client last month. compared access to netflix us libraries, ftp server whitelisting success rates, and general captcha hell on google searches. the data is weird. the streaming access was identical between their dedicated and shared ip offerings across all three, lmao. the only real win was whitelisting for some crusty self-hosted panel. so my question is this: are we just nostalgic for when these things felt necessary? google's core updates are mostly just a game of footprint whack-a-mole for smart operators, and i doubt they're flagging shared vpn ips harder than before. most privacy threat models today dont seem to justify the cost hike. citation needed on anyone showing a real security benefit outside of very niche self-hosted stuff.