I have a small VPS running a few scripts and some personal projects without any private information (just the keys for the services needed).
I want to expand it to selfhost more stuff like Google photos alternative, knowledge DB, git, etc., but I’m not sure how is my data protected inside a VPS.
There was a post mentioning everything is visible to the provider via the hypervisor, so I was wondering if an encrypted volume would make no difference for protecting any data uploaded there.
Am I being too paranoid? Or should I be investing in a small physical server?
Also worth mentioning that modern CPUs support VM-level encryption, so that even the host can’t see what’s inside the VM at all. The RAM is transparently encrypted by the CPU, so unless the provider goes to some pretty extreme (and expensive) length to extract the keys from the PSP for a regular random nobody, it’s barely worth thinking about. See: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/i386/amd-memory-encryption.html
As long as you don’t get into legal troubles the provider has better things to do than ruin their reputation with big corporate customers.
Encryption at rest never hurts however. But the runtime may also be encrypted and really private. Lemmy is very public anyway, I wouldn’t worry much.