What are some good VPS hosting provider recommendations?

Hosting provders have an EULA agreement that typically doesn’t state that a provider will examine your VPS contents unless we’re talking about Hetzner. No provider has invested into large scale mass surveillance programs on their customers to my knowledge.

The kind of risks people typically mean are multitenancy and evil technicians.

Large cloud providers like Amazon, GCP, Google do provide VPSes with hyperthreading disabled and pin VMs to a core (not with all plans, Amazon offers cheaper solutions with HT) and are crystal clear about their security practices. Infra is provisioned automatically and no technician could ssh or VNC into a customer’s machine to “debug performance of a node”.

Meanwhile your typical $3 VPS runs on Proxmox/xcp-ng and has multitenancy issues with shared networking, core pinning, EOL Xeons with spectre mitigations off not to mention bad security practices and an overall bad company culture around this topic.

Serious providers care about security a lot. While some providers survive on a margin, Amazon has insane budgets and can hire amazing engineers that do care and produce things like firecracker.

You have nothing to worry about if you’re not an APT. Cloud providers would examine contents of your machine only on court order/clear red flag leading the internal team to believe you’re doing nefarious things.