This is cool, but you should really understand what you're in for if you choose to do this. In particular, running your own VPN does not enhance your privacy posture, and in fact makes it much worse, because your little cloud VPS is uniquely yours and yours only. You become much more fingerprintable, and any sufficiently determined sysadmin can easily manually trace your cloud instance's IP back to you.
Yeah, marketing. Also, I had the same point / question: what do you really get out of this aside from possibly confounding local network attackers if you’re e.g. out at a coffee shop? This seems like a really bad idea if you’re doing something that would get you a DMCA strike, as now their automated systems can just email legal@vps-provider and get them to give up your billing info to sue you.
Censorship circumvention? Not everyone on this planet lives in your particular country. I also trust third-party VPNs and VPS providers (however dodgy they may be) a lot more than I trust my own ISP. That fact alone will tell you all you need to know.
What other utility do these VPNs that are hosted somewhere (like a random fly.io machine) offer? I have a VPN server running in my living room to access my home network when I'm out and about, but I don't see why you'd set one up just randomly somewhere unless you weren't interesting in the masking aspect.
This is great to escape untrusted/unknown local networks like a dodgy coffee shop or something. But definitely no protection against state level threats, etc.
