https://onionvps.com Offshore VPS hosting. No KYC. Crypto only. Practical writing about offshore hosting, privacy, jurisdiction and running servers. en Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:21:17 GMT https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-a-vps https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-a-vps Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and storage, running its own operating system on shared physical hardware. You get full root access and can install anything. It sits between shared hosting, where you control almost nothing, and a dedicated server, where you rent the whole machine. https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-a-vps-used-for https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-a-vps-used-for Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A VPS runs anything that needs to be online continuously: websites and APIs, game servers, VPN and proxy endpoints, mail servers, trading bots, CI runners, Docker workloads, media and file servers, blockchain nodes, and remote development environments. The common thread is a persistent machine with a public address and root access. https://onionvps.com/answers/how-much-does-a-vps-cost https://onionvps.com/answers/how-much-does-a-vps-cost Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A usable VPS starts at about $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe storage. A production instance with dedicated cores, 8 GB of RAM and 160 GB of storage runs around $34 a month. Storage-heavy plans with several terabytes start near $22. Longer billing terms reduce these by 5–22%. https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-the-cheapest-usable-vps https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-the-cheapest-usable-vps Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT About $4 a month buys 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe on real KVM virtualisation. That is genuinely enough for a WireGuard VPN, a DNS resolver, a Tor relay, a small bot or a static site. Below that price you are almost certainly buying an oversold container rather than a virtual machine. https://onionvps.com/answers/how-much-ram-do-i-need-for-a-vps https://onionvps.com/answers/how-much-ram-do-i-need-for-a-vps Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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 small website with a database. 8 GB is the comfortable floor for a production application or Docker stack. 16 GB and up is for CI, large databases, Magento or heavy crawling. https://onionvps.com/answers/how-many-vcpu-do-i-need https://onionvps.com/answers/how-many-vcpu-do-i-need Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Most workloads need fewer cores than people buy. One shared core saturates a gigabit VPN link. Two dedicated cores run a busy website. Four run a game server or a Docker stack. Beyond eight, you are usually buying parallelism for builds, crawling or transcoding. Whether cores are dedicated matters more than how many there are. https://onionvps.com/answers/how-much-bandwidth-does-a-vps-need https://onionvps.com/answers/how-much-bandwidth-does-a-vps-need Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Most projects use far less than they fear. A typical blog serving 50,000 monthly visits uses about 100 GB. A VPN carrying 1080p video for one person uses roughly 3 GB per hour. Video streaming and seedboxes are the exceptions, where terabytes are normal. Plans here include 2–50 TB, and one is unmetered. https://onionvps.com/answers/how-to-choose-a-vps-provider https://onionvps.com/answers/how-to-choose-a-vps-provider Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Check five things: virtualisation type (KVM, not OpenVZ), whether cores are dedicated, which jurisdiction the server sits in, what identity data the provider collects, and what happens when someone complains about you. Price is the easiest thing to compare and the least likely to matter after the first month. https://onionvps.com/answers/can-i-upgrade-a-vps-later https://onionvps.com/answers/can-i-upgrade-a-vps-later Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Yes. CPU and RAM can be increased with a reboot, usually in under two minutes. Disk can be grown online. Shrinking is not possible in place — a smaller plan requires a rebuild and restore. Moving to a different country is also a rebuild, because the data has to physically move. https://onionvps.com/answers/how-fast-can-a-vps-be-deployed https://onionvps.com/answers/how-fast-can-a-vps-be-deployed Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Provisioning takes under 60 seconds once payment confirms. The variable is the payment itself: Solana or TRON confirm in under a minute, Litecoin in about ten, Bitcoin in roughly twenty and Monero in about twenty. From clicking order to holding SSH credentials is typically two to twenty-five minutes depending on the coin. https://onionvps.com/answers/is-a-vps-worth-it https://onionvps.com/answers/is-a-vps-worth-it Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A VPS is worth it as soon as you need something shared hosting will not let you do: a specific runtime version, a background worker, a non-web service, Docker, or freedom from arbitrary process limits. If you only serve a static site and never want to touch a terminal, shared hosting is genuinely fine. https://onionvps.com/answers/do-i-need-a-managed-vps https://onionvps.com/answers/do-i-need-a-managed-vps Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT You need managed hosting if nobody on your side will apply security updates, configure a firewall or restore a backup. Managed plans cost two to five times more and remove that work. Unmanaged hosting assumes you are comfortable in a terminal — every OnionVPS plan is unmanaged, which is why it is priced as it is. https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-the-best-vps-for-beginners https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-the-best-vps-for-beginners Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Start with 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in the region closest to you. Ubuntu has the largest body of tutorials, which matters more than any specification when you are learning. Take a snapshot before every experiment — it turns a broken server into a two-minute rollback. https://onionvps.com/answers/do-you-offer-a-free-trial https://onionvps.com/answers/do-you-offer-a-free-trial Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT OnionVPS does not offer a free trial. Instead there is a seven-day money-back guarantee on a first order: if the service does not suit you, tell us within seven days of provisioning and we refund in full to an address you nominate. The entry plan is $4, which makes the risk small either way. https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-no-kyc-hosting https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-no-kyc-hosting Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/is-no-kyc-hosting-legal https://onionvps.com/answers/is-no-kyc-hosting-legal Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/how-to-buy-a-vps-anonymously https://onionvps.com/answers/how-to-buy-a-vps-anonymously Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/what-data-does-a-hosting-provider-collect https://onionvps.com/answers/what-data-does-a-hosting-provider-collect Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/do-vps-providers-keep-logs https://onionvps.com/answers/do-vps-providers-keep-logs Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/can-a-vps-be-traced-back-to-me https://onionvps.com/answers/can-a-vps-be-traced-back-to-me Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-offshore-hosting https://onionvps.com/answers/what-is-offshore-hosting Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/best-country-for-offshore-hosting https://onionvps.com/answers/best-country-for-offshore-hosting Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/what-are-the-14-eyes-countries https://onionvps.com/answers/what-are-the-14-eyes-countries Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/answers/which-country-has-no-data-retention https://onionvps.com/answers/which-country-has-no-data-retention Answers Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://onionvps.com/guides/buy-a-vps-anonymously-checklist https://onionvps.com/guides/buy-a-vps-anonymously-checklist Guides Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Anonymity is a chain, and it breaks at the weakest link. Four steps close the ones that matter: a no-KYC provider, a signup connection that is not your home network, an email alias used nowhere else, and payment in Monero. Everything after purchase is operational discipline. https://onionvps.com/guides/multi-region-failover-with-wireguard https://onionvps.com/guides/multi-region-failover-with-wireguard Guides Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Three instances in three countries, meshed over WireGuard, with the application bound only to the mesh and a health-checked DNS record in front, gives genuine fault tolerance for under $110 a month. The design constraint is database replication: synchronous within a region, asynchronous across them. https://onionvps.com/compare/vps-vs-dedicated-server https://onionvps.com/compare/vps-vs-dedicated-server Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A VPS is a slice of a physical machine with guaranteed CPU, RAM and disk; a dedicated server is the whole machine. A VPS wins on price, provisioning speed and elasticity. A dedicated server wins when you need every cycle, direct hardware access, or a workload that would be an unfair neighbour. Most projects that think they need dedicated hardware need dedicated cores, which a VPS provides. https://onionvps.com/compare/vps-vs-shared-hosting https://onionvps.com/compare/vps-vs-shared-hosting Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Shared hosting gives you a directory on a machine that hundreds of other sites also use, with no root access and hard limits on processes, memory and inodes. A VPS gives you an isolated machine with guaranteed resources and full root. Shared hosting is cheaper and requires no administration; a VPS is the point at which you stop being limited by someone else's configuration. https://onionvps.com/compare/vps-vs-cloud-hosting https://onionvps.com/compare/vps-vs-cloud-hosting Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A VPS is a fixed machine at a fixed monthly price. Hyperscaler cloud is a catalogue of managed services billed per unit of consumption. For a workload with predictable load, a VPS is typically three to ten times cheaper for the same compute — the cloud premium buys elasticity and managed services you may never use, plus egress charges that a flat-rate VPS does not have. https://onionvps.com/compare/kvm-vs-openvz https://onionvps.com/compare/kvm-vs-openvz Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT KVM is full hardware virtualisation: your instance runs its own kernel and cannot see the host. OpenVZ and LXC are container technologies that share the host kernel, which means no custom kernel modules, no WireGuard on older hosts, unreliable Docker, and memory accounting that lets the provider oversell. If a VPS is unusually cheap, it is usually OpenVZ. https://onionvps.com/compare/kvm-vs-lxc https://onionvps.com/compare/kvm-vs-lxc Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT LXC containers share the host kernel and start in milliseconds with almost no overhead; KVM virtual machines boot their own kernel with 2–5% overhead and a genuine security boundary. For multi-tenant hosting the distinction is decisive: a kernel vulnerability in an LXC host is a vulnerability affecting every tenant on it. https://onionvps.com/compare/offshore-vs-onshore-hosting https://onionvps.com/compare/offshore-vs-onshore-hosting Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Offshore hosting means placing a server in a jurisdiction other than your own, usually one outside the Fourteen Eyes alliances and outside EU data-retention rules. What changes is the legal process required to compel data: a foreign authority must work through mutual legal assistance treaties rather than issuing a domestic order. What does not change is that local law still applies, and that genuinely illegal content is still illegal. https://onionvps.com/compare/no-kyc-vs-kyc-hosting https://onionvps.com/compare/no-kyc-vs-kyc-hosting Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT KYC hosting requires government identification, a billing address and usually a payment card before provisioning. No-KYC hosting requires an email address and a crypto payment. The practical difference is what exists to be disclosed, breached or sold: a provider that never collected your passport cannot lose it, hand it over, or correlate it with your activity. https://onionvps.com/compare/shared-vcpu-vs-dedicated-vcpu https://onionvps.com/compare/shared-vcpu-vs-dedicated-vcpu Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A shared vCPU is scheduled against other tenants, so under contention your process waits — visible as steal time in top. A dedicated vCPU is pinned to a physical core reserved for you. For bursty workloads the difference is invisible; for anything latency-sensitive, tick-based or continuously busy, it is the single most important specification on the page. https://onionvps.com/compare/nvme-vs-ssd-vs-hdd https://onionvps.com/compare/nvme-vs-ssd-vs-hdd Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT NVMe reaches roughly 500,000 random IOPS with sub-100-microsecond latency; a SATA SSD manages around 90,000 IOPS; a 7,200 RPM HDD manages about 150. For anything with a database, that gap is the difference between a fast application and a slow one. HDD remains rational for one thing only: bulk sequential storage priced per terabyte. https://onionvps.com/compare/monero-vs-bitcoin-for-hosting https://onionvps.com/compare/monero-vs-bitcoin-for-hosting Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Bitcoin's ledger is public: anyone can see that an address paid a hosting invoice, and chain analysis can often connect that address to an exchange account with your identity attached. Monero hides sender, receiver and amount at the protocol level, so no such link exists. If privacy is why you are paying in crypto, Monero is the coin that actually delivers it. https://onionvps.com/compare/crypto-vs-card-hosting https://onionvps.com/compare/crypto-vs-card-hosting Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT A card payment creates a permanent, identity-linked record at your bank, the card network and the merchant, and can be reversed for up to 120 days. A crypto payment settles in minutes, is final, and links to no banking identity. The trade-off is real: no chargeback protection, and price volatility on non-stablecoins between invoice and confirmation. https://onionvps.com/compare/wireguard-vs-openvpn https://onionvps.com/compare/wireguard-vs-openvpn Comparisons Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT WireGuard is about 4,000 lines of kernel code with modern fixed cryptography; OpenVPN is roughly 100,000 lines in userspace with configurable ciphers. WireGuard is faster, reconnects instantly and is far easier to audit. OpenVPN survives on one advantage: it can run over TCP port 443 and look like ordinary TLS, which matters where UDP is blocked or VPNs are filtered. https://onionvps.com/guides/pay-for-hosting-with-monero https://onionvps.com/guides/pay-for-hosting-with-monero Guides Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Acquire XMR through an atomic swap or a decentralised exchange, hold it in a wallet you control, then select Monero at checkout and send the exact invoice amount to the address shown. Ten confirmations — about twenty minutes — and the server provisions automatically. https://onionvps.com/guides/docker-compose-production-stack https://onionvps.com/guides/docker-compose-production-stack Guides Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT A workable production stack is Caddy for automatic TLS, your application, PostgreSQL and Redis, defined in one Compose file with named volumes and health checks. On 8 GB of RAM with NVMe this handles substantial traffic, and a snapshot before each deploy makes rollback a two-minute operation. https://onionvps.com/guides/secure-a-new-vps-in-10-minutes https://onionvps.com/guides/secure-a-new-vps-in-10-minutes Guides Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT Five changes eliminate essentially every automated attack against a new server: key-based SSH with passwords disabled, no direct root login, a default-deny firewall covering both IPv4 and IPv6, unattended security updates, and fail2ban. Together they take about ten minutes and matter more than any provider feature. https://onionvps.com/guides/encrypted-vps-with-luks-remote-unlock https://onionvps.com/guides/encrypted-vps-with-luks-remote-unlock Guides Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT LUKS2 with a dropbear SSH daemon in the initramfs lets you encrypt the root filesystem and supply the passphrase remotely at every boot. The provider never holds the key, so a powered-off disk is ciphertext. It does not protect against a compromised hypervisor, and no provider can honestly claim otherwise. https://onionvps.com/guides/self-hosted-mail-server-that-delivers https://onionvps.com/guides/self-hosted-mail-server-that-delivers Guides Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT Installing a mail server is easy; being trusted by receivers is not. You need outbound port 25, a PTR record matching your banner hostname, SPF, DKIM and DMARC published correctly, address space with no spam history, and a gradual volume ramp. Miss any one and mail lands in spam. https://onionvps.com/guides/wireguard-vpn-in-5-minutes https://onionvps.com/guides/wireguard-vpn-in-5-minutes Guides Sat, 30 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT A working WireGuard server needs four things: a key pair, a wg0 interface configuration, IP forwarding with NAT, and one peer block per device. On a $4 instance the whole process takes about five minutes and will saturate a gigabit port. https://onionvps.com/guides/private-dns-with-adguard-and-unbound https://onionvps.com/guides/private-dns-with-adguard-and-unbound Guides Tue, 12 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT AdGuard Home filters and serves DNS-over-HTTPS; Unbound behind it performs full recursion so no upstream resolver ever sees your queries. On a $4 instance the pair uses under 200 MB of RAM and replaces the single richest source of behavioural data about you — your ISP's resolver. https://onionvps.com/guides/set-up-nftables-and-ipv6-firewall https://onionvps.com/guides/set-up-nftables-and-ipv6-firewall Guides Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMT nftables replaces iptables with a single unified ruleset that covers IPv4 and IPv6 together through the inet family. A correct base policy drops inbound by default, accepts established connections, permits loopback and ICMP, and opens only the ports you serve.