Bandwidth cost? Uploading a TB of VPN'd data would cost you $90 on AWS and a bit more on GCP. There are VPN providers that will let you do that for under $5/mo.

Also, if you want your public IP to be in a specific country, the cloud providers don't have regions in a lot of the smaller countries where VPN providers have servers. Or perhaps you if you want to jump around periodically (today I want my internet traffic to look like it's coming from Peru, tomorrow France, etc). To do that with VPS, you'd need to provision a bunch of them.

My VPN provider also has a features like nodes that route traffic through TOR or something they call "double VPN" where the VPN server connects to the internet through one of their other VPN servers. These are, perhaps, gimmicky features from a security standpoint, but if they're doing what they claim to and they've been implemented without introducing any vulnerabilities (big if), they could offer protection that would be expensive and complicated to setup yourself.

It depends on your threat model. Are you just wanting to get around your ISP selling your personal data and (in the future) slowing down your internet to certain sites? Host a VPS at DO or Linode or AWS (though you'll look a lot like a bot). This way is also useful for hosting things at your house, but have them look and act as if they are hosted in your provider's DC.

Are you trying to partially anonymize yourself on the internet and download Linux ISOs? Use a provider like PIA. The benefit of those is you're going to (probably) be connected to a node with dozens of others, certain entities would be dissuaded from tracking you, and cease and desist letters stop at PIA and never make it to you, as they don't maintain logs.

If you really want to be anonymous and not be able to be tracked by even governments, TOR is really your only option.

Mostly I just want to get around ISP tracking. In that case I might just look into this solution and host on AWS.

> partially anonymize yourself on the internet and download Linux ISOs...cease and desist letters stop at PIA

You can get cease and desist orders for downloading Linux ISOs?

It was a euphemism, though I don't know how much RedHat would like you swinging around a binary build of RHEL, but IANAL

'Downloading Linux ISOs' is basically 'torrenting stuff illegally'

Hi! Author of Algo here. You can read the full information about why we think a self-hosted VPN is better than a VPN service here: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/12/12/meet-algo-the-vpn-th...

See my comment above, it's a tradeoff depending on if you trust the host provider or the VPN provider more really.

Do you want anonymity, because then you probably want a VPN service. All the traffic from your personal VPN is tied to your instance which is owned by you. The traffic isn't being merged with anyone else.

If you want anonymity, you use Tor.

Well yeah, but if the choice is between a self-hosted VPN and and VPN service you should go with the latter.

No, if anonimity is a concern then you shouldn't be using a VPN at all. You should be using Tor. Anonimity should not be part of your evaluation of a VPN.

Depends if you need a VPN Service integrated into your own AS or not.