Privacy & no-KYC

No-KYC hosting is server hosting that does not require identity verification. No passport, no photo ID, no billing address and no payment card. An email address you control and a cryptocurrency payment are the entire signup. The provider therefore holds no identity information that could be breached, sold or compelled.

Yes. There is no general legal requirement to identify server customers in the jurisdictions where OnionVPS operates. Anti-money-laundering identification duties bind banks, payment institutions and certain regulated intermediaries — not compute providers. Choosing not to collect identity documents is a lawful business decision, not a loophole.

Use a provider that requires no identity verification, sign up from a network that is not your home connection, use an email alias created for the purpose, and pay in Monero. Those four steps remove the correlation points that normally link a server to a person: identity documents, source IP, email reuse and payment trail.

Most providers collect a name, billing address, payment card, phone number, government ID, signup IP address, and complete access and connection logs. OnionVPS collects an email address, a payment reference from the processor, and the technical state needed to run your instance. No name, no address, no document, no card, no connection logs.

Most do. Netflow records, connection logs and panel access logs are standard, retained for 30 to 365 days, and in the EU and UK certain retention is legally mandated. OnionVPS operates in jurisdictions with no such mandate and does not generate netflow or connection logs at all, so there is nothing to retain or disclose.

It depends entirely on the links you create, not on the hosting itself. A no-KYC server paid for in Monero and administered over Tor has no provider-side link to you. A server paid for with a card, or logged into from your home IP, or running an account in your name, is trivially linkable regardless of the provider.

Offshore hosting means placing a server in a jurisdiction other than your own — usually one outside the Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances and outside EU data-retention rules. The purpose is legal, not technical: compelling data from that server requires working through mutual legal assistance treaties rather than issuing a domestic order.

There is no single best country — it depends on which threat you are addressing. For legal protection with European latency, Switzerland or Iceland. For minimal applicable statute plus Americas latency, Panama. For maximum corporate separation, Seychelles. For EU peering without a Fourteen Eyes jurisdiction, Bulgaria, Romania or Moldova.

Five Eyes: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Nine Eyes adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway. Fourteen Eyes adds Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. These alliances share signals intelligence, which is why privacy-oriented hosting tends to avoid all fourteen.

Panama, Seychelles, Belize, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Moldova and Georgia impose no general data-retention obligation on hosting providers. Switzerland's obligations are narrow and telecoms-focused. Romania struck its retention law down twice on constitutional grounds, and the EU's original Data Retention Directive was invalidated by the Court of Justice in 2014.

A warrant canary is a regularly updated statement that a provider has not received a secret legal demand. If the statement stops being updated, the reader infers that it has. It works because many jurisdictions can compel silence but cannot compel a false statement — though the mechanism is untested in most courts.

Against physical seizure of a powered-off disk, decisively yes: the volume is ciphertext without your passphrase. Against an attacker with access to the running hypervisor, no — the key is in memory the host can read. Any provider claiming otherwise is overselling, and the distinction is the whole point.

Technically yes: any provider with hypervisor access can read an unencrypted guest disk and its memory. That is true of every virtualisation platform. What varies is whether they do, whether policy forbids it, and whether full-disk encryption keyed by you makes stored data unreadable when the instance is powered off.

Combine four things: a no-KYC host paid in Monero, a domain registered with privacy protection or an anonymous registrar, a CDN or reverse proxy so the origin IP is never public, and administration only over Tor or a VPN. Removing any one of these usually undoes the other three.

Use a registrar that accepts cryptocurrency and offers WHOIS privacy, and choose a TLD whose registry does not mandate public registrant data. Since GDPR most WHOIS records are already redacted, but the registrar still holds the underlying data — so paying in crypto matters more than the privacy add-on.

Bulletproof hosting is a provider that claims to ignore all abuse complaints and law enforcement, including for criminal activity. OnionVPS is not one. We hold no identity data and we do not act on speculative complaints — but we do not host malware command-and-control, phishing or child sexual abuse material, and we answer valid legal process.

It helps with one specific thing: it stops your home IP address appearing in the server's authentication logs and in any provider-side records. It does nothing about what the server itself does, what it sends, or how it was paid for. Useful as one layer, useless as the only one.