The simple answer is that VPN services are really pretty easy to stand up. There is an enormous menu of VPN services out there, and many of them are basically s

The simple answer is that VPN services are really pretty easy to stand up. There is an enormous menu of VPN services out there, and many of them are basically some slapped-together Ansible playbooks and machines in sketchy datacenters. Running a VPN service is actually advantageous in this regard, because you can place a lot of your infrastructure in the cheapest DC markets and it almost comes off as a feature (look at all those global PoPs!). And now more and more VPN services allow resellers, so you don't even need the Ansible playbooks... you can just sign up to resell. It's basically the 2010s version of web hosting in that regard, an industry that absolutely proliferated with tiny companies that were ultimately just reselling larger providers or running their own infrastructure very shoddily. It was seen as easy money, and that was true to an extent until they proliferated so much that it was hard to grab many customers... which lead to some very heavy-handed advertising pushes. Consider, for example, the large number of Usenet providers that have affiliated VPN services now... they're priced so cheap it's hard to imagine them making much money off of them, but consider that they're just reselling from a larger Usenet provider that already has a lot of owned capacity and bandwidth. Since Usenet is so storage heavy they may just run the VPN endpoints right on their NNTP servers. It's basically free for them to offer!