>You want people's private data? People will pay you to give it to them. Go ahead and sell the service for less than it costs due to the boatloads of data that you get.
The amount of "private data" as a VPN operator isn't a lot. Most sites nowadays are https, so at best you're getting browsing habits on a per-site basis. On the other hand, using a commercial VPN does confer advantages in some cases:
* geo restrictions: commercial vpn have servers in multiple countries, so you can easily switch to one that works. you can achieve the same with cloud servers, but you'll have manually spin them up/down, which isn't convenient
* anonymity: commercial vpns usually have dozens/hundreds of users on one server. You can also switch servers/regions to increase your anonymity set further. This is a much bigger anonymity set than your own private server, which is linked solely to you.
* bandwidth: if you're a heavy traffic user, you'll probably end up paying more. most cloud providers only give you around 0.5TB for a cheap server (within the price of a vpn subscription)
* DMCA/abuse: they handle the DMCA/abuse letters for you. With a self hosted server you'll have to at the very least respond to the ticket they sent otherwise they'll take down your server.
The amount of "private data" as a VPN operator isn't a lot. Most sites nowadays are https, so at best you're getting browsing habits on a per-site basis. On the other hand, using a commercial VPN does confer advantages in some cases:
* geo restrictions: commercial vpn have servers in multiple countries, so you can easily switch to one that works. you can achieve the same with cloud servers, but you'll have manually spin them up/down, which isn't convenient
* anonymity: commercial vpns usually have dozens/hundreds of users on one server. You can also switch servers/regions to increase your anonymity set further. This is a much bigger anonymity set than your own private server, which is linked solely to you.
* bandwidth: if you're a heavy traffic user, you'll probably end up paying more. most cloud providers only give you around 0.5TB for a cheap server (within the price of a vpn subscription)
* DMCA/abuse: they handle the DMCA/abuse letters for you. With a self hosted server you'll have to at the very least respond to the ticket they sent otherwise they'll take down your server.