Primary benefit of using a VPS:

Placing mission critical items there which you can not afford to have go down due to hardware failure Some of those items may be a DNS Server, uptime monitor, or VPN/Wireguard Tunnel.

They are usually quite fast, and will provide a STATIC IP which makes it easier to set your domain's DNS resolver to, it never changes as long as you keep paying. :)

**Disadvantage of VPS: **

Who says they don't log into your VPS Instance and snoop around? I'm sure about 99.99% of VPS hosts will never do that and are ethical, and honestly, won't really care to. At a moment's notice, the VPS can close shop and take your data with them. (I had that once a few years ago). No warning was given and they went dark. Very aggravating. Fortunately, I had a fairly recent backup but still.

If you do go with a VPS, a place which supports KVM is a huge bonus! You can then install just about any host OS you want. Pivo is a good place for this and they are reasonably priced. They've been around since 1997 and I doubt they will go anywhere. Or you can spin up an instance at Linode and take advantage of some of the free trials they have (Jupiter broadcasting a podcast production company has something like $100 credit for them, so you can get your 'feet wet' testing things out.

My advice, if you go with a VPS, avoid eBay for hosting plans, and read reviews of the sites you are considering. Trust pilot and others are often great resources.

**Benefits of your own hardware: ** You have everything on your server, you know where everything is and can have the peace of mind knowing it's there and not looked at by anyone but you or those you trust.

Disadvantages of your own hardware

If anything fails, you are responsible for repairing/replacing it, this can also mean some massive downtime depending on how long it takes.

Your hardware is limited by the resources you provide it, Memory, Disk Space etc. Your ISP may throttle your data and cap the usage as well.