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Possibly because the former option is advertised constantly and most people aren't aware of the latter.

VPN services are cheaper than a VPS and most people just want to pirate movies without getting legal threats or to avoid region locking.

Are they? I can lease a VPS for under $12 a year. I don’t know of a VPN service that cheap unless it’s free and has limitations.

that cheap? where?

The offerings on lowendtalk.com eg. https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/173484/guess-whos-back...

That would have lower bandwidth, no easy way to switch countries, and your server IP is completely static and identifiable (worse privacy). And it's more likely to be a datacenter IP which is blocked.

Yeah, the availability of countries and switching between several IP addresses is the only thing that I can think of.

Because good luck getting the average person to know what SSH is, much less how to use it.