Yeah, this is what I was thinking of doing. Probably with wire guard. I haven't ever used nginx though. How much vps do you need to route a gigabit? Do you do filtering at your vps? Packet inspection?
Nginx is a fantastic tool! I have 2TB/month of traffic for my VPS and I don't come anywhere near hitting that. No, my VPS is a dumb TCP forwarder that's all it does. I just have some IP based limits, that's all.