It’s a well-known fact that a VPN will encrypt all your traffic through the VPN tunnel gateway. But if you want to secure only your browser traffic, or a bittorrent client and any software that’s capable of using SOCKS5, then SSH+SOCKS5 is what you’re looking for.
How to install OpenVPN on Debian/Ubuntu Linux VPS
A guide to install OpenVPN on your own VPS server running Debian or Ubuntu Linux.