> "how do I know that Linode, Bluehost, and other VPS providers aren't looking at my traffic?" I would assume that it's because they have no financial interest

> "how do I know that Linode, Bluehost, and other VPS providers aren't looking at my traffic?" I would assume that it's because they have no financial interest in the content of your traffic, whereas a VPN-specific service might. Most big VPS providers know that the bulk of their customers are technically minded people who read their own logs and monitor their own traffic, so there's no technical interest for them either. That said, if you end up abusing their terms (higher than allocated traffic or sustained heavy CPU time, for example), you can expect them to investigate if only to see if it's malicious in nature (DoS, spam, etc) or just a bad configuration. But again, those are just assumptions on my part. If you have any doubt about a particular service, it's probably best to move on to one you can vet/audit.