Knowledge base
Answers
100 direct answers about VPS hosting, offshore jurisdictions, privacy and crypto payment. Each one leads with the answer.
Short answer
This is a corpus of 100 direct answers across 8 topics: choosing and sizing a VPS, privacy and no-KYC hosting, crypto payment, law and jurisdiction, server setup, performance, and where to host. Each answer opens with a self-contained response of under 75 words, followed by the detail that qualifies it.
Choosing & sizing
What a VPS is, what it costs, and how to size one without overbuying.
- What is a VPS? A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and storage, running its …
- What is a VPS used for? A VPS runs anything that needs to be online continuously: websites and APIs, game servers, VPN and proxy …
- How much does a VPS cost? A usable VPS starts at about $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe storage. A production i…
- What is the cheapest VPS that is actually usable? About $4 a month buys 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe on real KVM virtualisation. That is genuinely…
- How much RAM does a VPS need? Match RAM to the workload, not to a price tier. 1 GB runs a VPN, DNS resolver or small bot. 2–4 GB runs a…
- How many vCPUs does a VPS need? Most workloads need fewer cores than people buy. One shared core saturates a gigabit VPN link. Two dedica…
- How much bandwidth does a VPS need? Most projects use far less than they fear. A typical blog serving 50,000 monthly visits uses about 100 GB…
- How do I choose a VPS provider? Check five things: virtualisation type (KVM, not OpenVZ), whether cores are dedicated, which jurisdiction…
- Can I upgrade a VPS later? Yes. CPU and RAM can be increased with a reboot, usually in under two minutes. Disk can be grown online. …
- How quickly can a VPS be deployed? Provisioning takes under 60 seconds once payment confirms. The variable is the payment itself: Solana or …
- Is a VPS worth it compared to shared hosting? A VPS is worth it as soon as you need something shared hosting will not let you do: a specific runtime ve…
- Do I need a managed VPS? You need managed hosting if nobody on your side will apply security updates, configure a firewall or rest…
- What is the best VPS setup for a beginner? Start with 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in the region closest to you. Ubuntu has the largest …
- Is there a free trial or a free VPS? OnionVPS does not offer a free trial. Instead there is a seven-day money-back guarantee on a first order:…
Privacy & no-KYC
What a provider knows about you, and how to make that as little as possible.
- What is no-KYC hosting? No-KYC hosting is server hosting that does not require identity verification. No passport, no photo ID, n…
- Is no-KYC hosting legal? Yes. There is no general legal requirement to identify server customers in the jurisdictions where OnionV…
- How do I buy a VPS anonymously? Use a provider that requires no identity verification, sign up from a network that is not your home conne…
- What data does a hosting provider collect about me? Most providers collect a name, billing address, payment card, phone number, government ID, signup IP addr…
- Do VPS providers keep logs of what I do? Most do. Netflow records, connection logs and panel access logs are standard, retained for 30 to 365 days…
- Can a VPS be traced back to me? It depends entirely on the links you create, not on the hosting itself. A no-KYC server paid for in Moner…
- What is offshore hosting? Offshore hosting means placing a server in a jurisdiction other than your own — usually one outside the F…
- Which country is best for offshore hosting? There is no single best country — it depends on which threat you are addressing. For legal protection wit…
- Which countries are in the Five, Nine and Fourteen Eyes? Five Eyes: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Nine Eyes adds Denmark, …
- Which countries have no mandatory data retention? Panama, Seychelles, Belize, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Moldova and Georgia impose no general data-retention obl…
- What is a warrant canary and does it work? A warrant canary is a regularly updated statement that a provider has not received a secret legal demand.…
- Is full-disk encryption useful on a VPS? Against physical seizure of a powered-off disk, decisively yes: the volume is ciphertext without your pas…
- Can my hosting provider see the files on my VPS? Technically yes: any provider with hypervisor access can read an unencrypted guest disk and its memory. T…
- How do I host a website anonymously? Combine four things: a no-KYC host paid in Monero, a domain registered with privacy protection or an anon…
- How do I register a domain anonymously? Use a registrar that accepts cryptocurrency and offers WHOIS privacy, and choose a TLD whose registry doe…
- What is bulletproof hosting, and is OnionVPS one? Bulletproof hosting is a provider that claims to ignore all abuse complaints and law enforcement, includi…
- Does using a VPN to connect to my VPS help? It helps with one specific thing: it stops your home IP address appearing in the server's authentication …
Crypto payment
Paying for infrastructure without a bank, a card or an identity check.
- Can I pay for a VPS with cryptocurrency? Yes — at OnionVPS it is the only way to pay. Checkout accepts 20 cryptocurrencies across more than 15 net…
- Which cryptocurrency is best for paying for hosting? Monero for privacy — it hides sender, receiver and amount at the protocol level. USDT on TRON for cost an…
- How do I pay for a VPS with Monero? Choose a plan, select XMR at checkout, and an invoice appears with a fresh Monero address, the exact amou…
- How do I pay for a VPS with Bitcoin? Select BTC at checkout and an invoice appears with a fresh address, an exact amount and a locked rate val…
- Is paying with cryptocurrency anonymous? It depends entirely on the coin. Monero is private by protocol design — amounts and parties are hidden. B…
- How long does a crypto payment take to confirm? It varies by chain: Solana and TON confirm in under a minute, TRON in about a minute, Litecoin in around …
- What happens if I underpay or overpay an invoice? Shortfalls up to 3% are accepted automatically and the order provisions normally — this covers wallets th…
- What happens if the crypto price changes while I am paying? The invoice locks an exchange rate for its 90-minute lifetime, so movement during that window does not af…
- Can I get a refund if I paid in crypto? Yes. First orders carry a seven-day money-back guarantee: tell us within seven days of provisioning and w…
- Do you accept PayPal, credit cards or bank transfer? No. OnionVPS is crypto-only, deliberately. Accepting cards would require collecting a name, billing addre…
- Are there setup fees or hidden charges? No setup fee, no provisioning charge, and no bandwidth overage billing. The plan price includes the trans…
- What is included in every plan? Full root access, KVM virtualisation with custom kernel support, custom ISO upload, an out-of-band VNC co…
Law & jurisdiction
Offshore hosting, the DMCA, subpoenas, abuse handling and what is actually allowed.
- Is offshore hosting legal? Yes. Renting a server in another country is an ordinary commercial transaction, and no jurisdiction we op…
- Does the DMCA apply to offshore hosting? The DMCA is United States copyright statute. Its notice-and-takedown procedure and safe harbour apply to …
- What happens if you receive a subpoena or court order? We assess whether it is valid legal process from a court with jurisdiction over OnionVPS. If it is, we co…
- What is an MLAT and why does it matter for hosting? A mutual legal assistance treaty is the formal channel through which one country asks another to gather e…
- What content is not allowed on your servers? Child sexual abuse material, which we report to the appropriate authority. Malware command-and-control, r…
- How do you handle abuse complaints? Complaints are triaged by evidence, not by volume. Automated copyright notices to non-US locations are fo…
- Will my server be suspended if someone complains about it? Not for a single unverified complaint. Suspension is reserved for active, ongoing harm: an instance parti…
- Can my VPS be seized? Physical seizure of hosting hardware is rare and requires a criminal warrant executed at the datacentre b…
- Does the GDPR apply if I host outside the EU? The GDPR follows the data subject, not the server. If you process personal data of people in the EU, it a…
- Who is legally responsible for content on a VPS? You are. On an unmanaged VPS you are the operator of the service and the publisher of its content; the pr…
- Can I run a Tor exit node? Middle relays and bridges are permitted on any OnionVPS instance, without restriction. Exit relays are pe…
Setup & operation
SSH, firewalls, mail, Docker, backups and the rest of running a server.
- How do I connect to a VPS with SSH? Run ssh root@your-server-ip from any terminal on macOS, Linux or Windows 10 and later. Use the key you su…
- How do I secure a new VPS? Five steps cover the overwhelming majority of real-world compromises: key-based SSH with password authent…
- How do I stop SSH brute-force attacks? Disable password authentication entirely — brute force against key-based SSH is not possible. Add fail2ba…
- How do I set up a firewall on a VPS? Use nftables on modern Linux, or ufw as a friendlier front end. Set the default inbound policy to drop, a…
- Can I install any operating system on a VPS? On KVM, yes. OnionVPS provides templates for Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, NixO…
- Can I upload my own ISO? Yes, on every plan, at no cost and with no approval step. Upload the ISO from the panel or point us at a …
- What is KVM virtualisation? KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is full hardware virtualisation built into the Linux kernel, using pro…
- Can I run Docker on a VPS? On a KVM VPS, yes, without restriction — install Docker Engine from the official repository and everythin…
- Can I run nested virtualisation on a VPS? Yes. Nested virtualisation is enabled on every OnionVPS instance, so you can run KVM guests inside your i…
- Is outbound port 25 open, so I can run a mail server? Yes, outbound port 25 is open on every OnionVPS instance by default. There is no support ticket, no accou…
- Can I set reverse DNS (PTR) records myself? Yes, for both IPv4 and IPv6, directly from the control panel, and changes propagate within minutes. Rever…
- Can I run my own mail server on a VPS? Yes. Port 25 is open, reverse DNS is self-service, and our address space has no spam history. Mailcow or …
- How many IP addresses can I have on one VPS? Every instance includes one IPv4 address and a routed IPv6 /64 — that is 18 quintillion v6 addresses, not…
- Do you provide IPv6? Yes — a routed /64 subnet on every instance, at every tier, at no cost. Not a single address: an entire s…
- What is a snapshot and how is it different from a backup? A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of your instance's disk, taken instantly and stored on the same infras…
- How do I back up a VPS properly? Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of media, one off-site. In practice that means snapshot…
- How do I reset a forgotten root password? Use the out-of-band VNC console in the panel, reboot into single-user or rescue mode from the bootloader,…
- What is an out-of-band console and why does it matter? An out-of-band console attaches to your instance's virtual display and keyboard through the control panel…
- How do I move my VPS to another country? Data has to physically move, so a region change is a rebuild rather than a live migration. Deploy the new…
- Should I use Ubuntu or Debian on my server? Use Ubuntu LTS if you are learning or want the largest body of tutorials and newer packages. Use Debian f…
Performance & reliability
Steal time, latency, benchmarking and what uptime numbers really mean.
- What is CPU steal time and why does it matter? Steal time is the percentage of time your virtual CPU was ready to run but the hypervisor gave the physic…
- Why is my VPS slow? In order of likelihood: memory exhaustion causing swap thrashing, disk IO saturation, CPU steal time on s…
- How much latency should I expect from a VPS? Within a metro, under 5 ms. Within a continent, 10–40 ms. Across the Atlantic, 70–90 ms. Europe to Asia, …
- How many visitors can a VPS handle? A well-configured 2 vCPU / 4 GB instance serves a static site to millions of monthly visits, a cached Wor…
- How do I benchmark a VPS? Measure the three things that actually vary: single-thread CPU with sysbench, disk with fio at 4K random …
- How much faster is NVMe than SATA SSD? Roughly five times the random IOPS — about 500,000 versus 90,000 — and around five times lower latency, u…
- What uptime should I expect from a VPS? Our SLA is 99.99% per instance, which permits about 4.4 minutes of downtime a month, and observed availab…
- Does server location affect SEO? Indirectly and measurably. Search engines do not rank by server country, but they do measure page speed, …
- What is DDoS protection and do I need it? DDoS protection filters attack traffic upstream of your server so legitimate requests still arrive. It ha…
- Is a VPS secure? The isolation is strong: KVM enforces separation in hardware, and escaping it is a serious research-grade…
- What is the difference between shared and dedicated vCPU? A shared vCPU is scheduled against other tenants, so under contention your process waits — visible as ste…
Locations & jurisdictions
Where to put a server, and what changes when you move it.
- Which VPS location is best for European users? Frankfurt or Amsterdam for the lowest latency — DE-CIX and AMS-IX are the two densest exchanges in Europe…
- Which VPS location is best for Asian users? Singapore for Southeast Asia and India, Tokyo for Japan and Korea, Hong Kong for Greater China, and Mumba…
- Which VPS location is best for Latin America? São Paulo for Brazil — IX.br is the largest exchange in the southern hemisphere and nothing else comes cl…
- Which VPS location is best for African users? Johannesburg for southern Africa — NAPAfrica is by far the largest exchange on the continent. Lagos for W…
- How do I get US latency without US jurisdiction? Nassau in the Bahamas is roughly 45 ms from Miami, and Panama City about 60 ms — both outside US jurisdic…
- Is Switzerland good for privacy-focused hosting? Yes — it has the strongest and best-tested statutory framework in our fleet. Swiss law treats hosted data…
- Is Panama good for offshore hosting? Yes, and it is where OnionVPS started. Panama is outside every intelligence-sharing alliance, imposes no …
- Is Iceland good for hosting? Yes, particularly for publishing and journalism. Iceland is in none of the Eyes alliances, has unusually …
- How many locations and countries do you offer? OnionVPS operates 138 locations across 116 countries and 8 regions, including offshore and privacy-tier j…
About OnionVPS
Who we are, what we hold, and what we will and will not do.
- What is OnionVPS? OnionVPS is an offshore VPS hosting provider founded in 2020 and incorporated in Seychelles. It sells KVM…
- How long has OnionVPS been operating? Since 2020. The first region was Panama City; Zurich, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Yor…
- What makes OnionVPS different from other VPS providers? Four things: no identity verification of any kind, crypto-only payment with no card or bank involved, 138…
- What is your uptime SLA? 99.99% per instance, measured monthly on network and hypervisor availability. Breaches earn automatic ser…
- How do I contact support? Through the encrypted ticket desk in the control panel, by email to [email protected], or over Telegra…
- Is OnionVPS a legitimate hosting provider? OnionVPS is a registered Seychelles International Business Company operating since 2020, running its own …