Can the vps provider not read everything on your server, unless it’s explicitly encrypted?
I’m asking because I’m interested in self-hosting mainly as a way to get privacy respecting services where good hosted ones don’t exist. I’m not sure I really want to deal with running my own hardware
They have full access to the hardware, everything on it, and all traffic going to/from it. So you need to trust the provider you use somewhat.
If you just want privacy from the usual online services by running some of your own stuff, then that’s totally fine.