Can the vps provider not read everything on your server, unless it’s explicitly encrypted?
I’m asking because I’m interested in self-hosting mainly as a way to get privacy respecting services where good hosted ones don’t exist. I’m not sure I really want to deal with running my own hardware
If it is in the RAM, they can read it. Since it is a virtual server they can freeze and clone the current state and connect to that copy and read all data that is currently encrypted/opened without you even knowing.
While this is technically true, there is no provider on the planet that can freeze state of RAM in a way that would be useful for this.
It’s technically feasible to recover data on a laptop’s RAM, but not from a virtualized multi-tenant instance tied to a specific user.
You don’t need to freeze the state of the RAM, you freeze the whole virtual machine - including the virtual RAM.
Did you read the original comment???