Whoogle, a meta-search that strips away all the nasty things from Google. Can’t live without it tbh.

I don’t know if it will work, but it’s possible to tunnel all your traffic through a VPS using SSH and a piece of software called sshuttle.

I don’t know about Linode, but with Hostinger you get a resource cap on CPU usage. If you put your VPS to crunch something you will be throttled down on CPU. I once tried importing Wikipedia on my VPS and had my CPU throttled down. I pay for the cheapest VPS with only one CPU. In this case you don’t really get the “full” VPS to yourself…