What cloud VPS host is the best for privacy and security? I want to self host stuff for myself some tools. Mental Outlaw make a video last year about self hosting your own VPN with a service called Vultr but back in December vultr added to their TOS that they own what you host and a bunch of other scary stuff. So I don’t trust Vultr anymore. I don’t see recommended vps hosts on privacyguides website. So what do you guys think I should use to self host various things like a VPN, Nextcloud, and so on.
You can also get an old PC without a gpu and hook it up to a domain via dyndns or similar. Or just wireguard to it. You’d have higher upfront costs, but very small running costs, so it will be worth it at some point and you fully controll the data on it.
Electricity isn’t free and nor is your time, you are never going to beat commercial VPS hosters on price.
Looking at my bills, my cluster server costs me ~15€ per month in electricity.
It has:
- 4x6 arm cores
- 4x6 GB RAM
- 8TB HDD storage
- 3TB nvme storage
As soon as you link me a VPS offer with comparable specs, but lower monthly cost, I am switching.
Those are not VPS specs, that is more the kind where you would get a dedicated hardware server at a hoster. Hosting your own becomes much more viable the larger your operation becomes.
If one forgoes contracts and is trusting, anybody can host their private files on my private, self-hosted servers. But only if it’s sensitive documents. Like the stuff you wouldn’t want to host at a standard online host.
Completely free, aint that just a sweet deal?
Personally I find time and money tertiary to privacy and would pay 10 times the standard rate for a truly secure host.
Unfortunately they don’t exist so I learned to self host encrypted servers with VPN access on private infrastructure.
Beat use of time and money ever.
You need to trust your provider. If you choose a bigger one, chances are you are a bit safer. Those kind of providers make big bucks on companies, so if they harm the trust of their customers they are out of business. You could try to choose software which implements E2EE and zero-trust to be safer, but those are not available on all software categories. VPS providers have access to all your stuff. So it’s all up to you which provider you trust. I would prefer a bigger name too some obscure little basement hoster.
No one has mentioned Njalla. I haven’t used their server offerings, but they are probably the best for privacy.
Run a home server and VPN to it through a VPS if needed, so they see nothing. E2EE everything.
