Yes you can do this. Two problems:
It isn’t fast. Watch your MTU.
Youll have to make sure return packets come through the VPS on their way back. You’ll have to set up those packets to masquerade on their way out, otherwise you’d see internal IPs on the internet (they get dropped immediately). You can either masquerade them on the inside so they appear to be coming from your VPS (internally), or if you want the destination computer to see the real Internet IP, you’d need to set up rules on the destinarion computer which routes packets through the VPS otherwise they’d return via the default gateway.
If you look at the output of ls -l , you’ll see a number on the left which tells you how the pointer counter. Folders are usually rather high, as both the parent folder, and any child folders point to it.
For files it counts the number of hardlinks.