Why run your own VPN instead of renting one
A commercial VPN is a company that sees all of your traffic and asks you to trust its logging policy. Running your own on a VPS inverts that: you are the only tenant of the endpoint, the exit IP is yours alone rather than shared with thousands of strangers, and the "no-logs policy" is a fact about a machine you control rather than a promise on a marketing page.
The trade is that a self-hosted endpoint does not rotate IPs and is not built to defeat a nation-state — it is built to move your traffic off a hostile local network and onto an IP in a jurisdiction you chose. For that, one small box is enough.
How much server you actually need
WireGuard is extraordinarily light. The Nano plan (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 2 TB transfer at $2.90/month) handles a single user's full-tunnel traffic without noticing it. Step up to Micro ($4.90/month, 4 TB transfer) only if several people share the endpoint or you route heavy download traffic through it, because the ceiling you will hit first is transfer, not CPU.
Bandwidth overage is never billed here — exceed the allowance and the port throttles to 10 Mbps for the rest of the month rather than generating a surprise invoice, which for a personal VPN is the right failure mode.
Where to put the exit
The exit IP's jurisdiction is the whole point of choosing your own, so pick it deliberately. Amsterdam is the default for European and transatlantic latency; Iceland and Romania add legal distance from routine commercial pressure while keeping millisecond round-trips to the continent. The United States location exists for latency to North America and is the wrong choice if jurisdiction is why you are here.
Running a VPN endpoint is explicitly permitted, and so is a Tor relay on the same box — there is a free toggle at checkout that flags the server so the abuse desk handles reports correctly.
Frequently asked questions
Can I run WireGuard on a VPS?
Yes. NimbusVPS sells full KVM virtualisation with your own kernel, so the WireGuard kernel module loads normally, as do nftables and any other networking module. This is not OpenVZ or a shared-kernel container, where kernel modules are the host's to decide. The Nano plan at $2.90/month is enough for a personal endpoint.
Does a self-hosted VPN keep logs?
That is entirely up to your configuration — WireGuard itself logs nothing by default. On the provider side, NimbusVPS keeps access logs for 0 days, meaning they are not kept, and runs no deep packet inspection or traffic mirroring. There is no identity on file to tie a tunnel to in the first place, because ordering requires only an email address and a crypto payment.
Which is cheaper, a VPN service or my own VPS?
A VPS is usually cheaper and always more private. The Nano plan is $2.90 per month for an endpoint that is yours alone, versus $5–$12 per month for a shared commercial VPN. You trade the commercial VPN's IP rotation and multi-region switching for a single dedicated exit whose logging policy you actually control.
Can I be anonymous with a self-hosted VPN?
A self-hosted VPN moves your traffic to an IP you chose and hides it from your local network, but that IP is used only by you, which is a different privacy property than a crowd. For unlinkability you would layer Tor on top. What NimbusVPS contributes is the absence of a KYC record linking the server to you: no ID, no card, crypto payment, and 0-day logs.
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