I have seen the following argument (summarized here as I understand it):
Despite the promises that VPN providers make, it is known that they will often monitor your traffic, collect logs, might share your information, and will collaborate with law enforcement. Renting a VPS and running an OpenVPN server on it and using that as your VPN, is better - because you have full control over the logs. Let’s assume we trust the VPS provider to adhere to their TOS and privacy policy.
To talk about a concrete typical usecase, I am thinking about how this applies to downloading illegal torrents. In my current view, the only scenario in which the self-hosted option makes sense is if you pay for hosting using crypto and reveal no personal information during the process. Otherwise using a VPS would be virtually the same as downloading it through your ISP - and in some cases even worse - because the VPS provider might be more easily pushed to throwing you under the bus if abuse is reported since this might be a TOS violation. On the other hand, a VPN provider has a much larger motivation to protect users against this because the way that users perceive these protections is fundamental to their business model.
So, is there a reason to self-host a VPN instead of using a VPN provider? If so, should the VPS be acquired anonymously, or are there ways to protect yourself while using a provider that you gave your personal information to?
Its not so much about using it for illegal stuff (but ofc then a VPS rented on your own name running a VPN makes even less sense) but the high amount of traffic / occupying bandwidth that is the problem for these VPS providers. They usually over-provision their services and sell a lot of cheap VPS while having relatively little bandwith shared between all these VPS. So if they allow one customer to torrent movies via their VPS that can easily have an impact on hundreds of other VPS customers by clogging up their allocated bandwidth as well.
But the VPS provider knows exactly what sites you visit and so on when you run a VPN on one of their servers (so does any VPN provider btw.). It might be just that you have more trust in the VPS provider keeping that information safe then you home ISP or the local wifi in the coffee shop you go to.
In most cases a VPN is pretty useless and snake-oil to be honest, unless you have very specific needs and threat profile like living in China and wanting to circumvent their “great firewall” or other similar censorship efforts.
Edit: if you rent a VPS anyways for other purposes, it is relatively little effort to put up a Wireguard VPN on that and use it on certain occasions like online shopping on a unsecure airport wifi or such. It can also help using VoIP on a mobile data connection that blocks VoIP otherwise and so on. But I would not rent a VPS just for that purpose.
Thank you. VoIP is something that I have vaguely heard about but have never looked into - maybe I should, it sounds interesting.
From this thread I have gotten a few ideas. It would make sense to host a VPN from my raspberry pi at home. The network at my university is monitored in a personalized manner, for example, so I could route most of my connections through my raspberry pi to avoid snooping. The university network is good for accessing papers though, so I need to learn how to specify that the browser should access academic papers through the uni network directly and everything else via VPN.
Voice over IP. If you ever had a voice call on your phone that wasn’t through your mobile phone number, like Messenger, Telegram, Jitsi, Discord, TeamSpeak, Mumble etc.
Yeah, funnily enough through lots of mobile phone network operators block SIP VoIP calls while allowing WhatsApp etc through.
Ah, thank you. I thought that it meant a way to simulate having a phone in the sense that one is able to have a “phone number” associated with a voice call program.