I feel like thats just trading one ISP for another. At least with a VPN service they can do things like not keep logs and make torrenting email nastygrams go to /dev/null, because they honestly cannot forward it to the right person.

Unfortunately, your hosting provider gets to see

1. Tunnelled & encrypted (and in most cases, easily identifiable as VPN) traffic coming from your VPN client to your server

2. Untunnelled traffic from your server to whatever server endpoint you're visiting.

Correlating the two, even when it's a massive multi-user service, is not difficult for a hosting provider with half a clue to do. Especially when handed a police order (which they usually have an obligation to not tell you about).

Running your own VPN server doesn't provide you with anonymity, but if configured right, it'll give you more privacy compared to just blindly trusting some random VPN companies with your data. Your data that passed through your own VPN server will only be seen by you and your vps vendor (as opposed to your VPN provider and whatever vendors they used to run their services).

Completely agreed, however the parent comment suggests that they aren't aware that their vps provider's underlying network infrastructure is 'snooping' on them by default:

> I seriously doubt my hosting provider would jeopardize their business by snooping on ... a vpn given the breach of trust would cause large customers to ditch them.

Any half decent network provider logs sampled flow data by default. This is all that is needed to de-anonymise any vpn session. Even on a host that is shared by hundreds of VPN sessions.

> This is why I self host

Goals are to hide your traffic from ISP (1) and your real IP from internet (2). Self host VPN achieves (1) but not (2), your VPN's IP is yours truly.

How do you know my goals? :)

Maybe I just can't always trust my ISP (ex: public wifi).

If I want to also hide my IP I can use Tor with or without a VPN.