Not a good idea if you know that you're targeted by the government. ;) In fact this makes it much easier for them to get access to your data. If they know your

Not a good idea if you know that you're targeted by the government. ;) In fact this makes it much easier for them to get access to your data. If they know your name they can get to your credit card transactions. From you're credit card transactions they get to your hoster. And from your hoster they get the data that's stored on your VPS. You can somehow mitigate this issue by storing your important data on an encrypted filesystem, but this does not really solve this problem as the key has still to be kept in memory.