There's no reason for anyone even moderately saavy to use a commercial private VPN. It's really insecure and expensive. Just use Streisand on a DigitalOcean droplet, AWS, etc.
Can't echo this enough. Without a VPN, your ISP can see some of your traffic (unencrypted + who you talk to). When you use a commercial VPN, the ability to snoop like your ISP just transfers to them. As much as we love to hate our ISPs, some of those services seem pretty shady by my estimation, and have very little oversight / no barriers to being unscrupulous.
Streisand is just a couple commands + whatever steps your cloud provider requires to get API keys. Take advantage of different regions to place your VPN(s) wherever you want in the world. Each installation comes with detailed instructions to configure VPN clients on your desktop or phone. Works great once you've got it running, and probably ends up being cheaper than most of those other shady services.
Tunnelling through a hosting provider doesn't provide any additional privacy. It just moves your exposure.
Perhaps I am unusual, but I trust my ISP with my privacy more than I trust the typical hosting provider.
I understand that this doesn't apply to most of the US because of your monopolistic ISP problem. In other places though, I don't think a blanket "just tunnel through a hosting provider" recommendation is appropriate.
>Perhaps I am unusual, but I trust my ISP with my privacy more than I trust the typical hosting provider.
You're lucky in this regard. Having no choice but Comcast, the number one threat to my privacy is my ISP. So that makes tunneling to an outside VPN very useful. I trust DigitalOcean far more. Although in a different situation I think you're absolutely right.
If you care about privacy, don't host it on US infrastructure. There has been so much exposure about this, that should have been enough to teach you not to burn yourself.
What if the VPS provider logs? My guess would be that DO keep logs of assigned IP to account which is arguably worse than what is done by the private VPNs.
Streisand is just a couple commands + whatever steps your cloud provider requires to get API keys. Take advantage of different regions to place your VPN(s) wherever you want in the world. Each installation comes with detailed instructions to configure VPN clients on your desktop or phone. Works great once you've got it running, and probably ends up being cheaper than most of those other shady services.