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Seeking recommendations for privacy-focused host
Hi all,
Happy New Year! I am looking for recommendations for privacy-focused shared and VPS (KVM) provider. What I mean is they don't require personal info and accepts crypto payments like njalla.
Our content isn't illegal, pirated or attack-prone. But it admittedly contains sensitive, adult content for 21 and over, intended for a small community. It will be heavily filtered, and moderated. No vids, but may require a bit of storage for photos. Hopefully NVM as there is gonna be discussion-based pages. It is a new project so traffic is minimal.
Ram is hopefully at least 4gb for VPS, with budget max of 30$ monthly.
I am aware of Incognet, and highly considering their VPS, but their shared is low on storage - for small blog.
I am still open for suggestions. Thanks so much!
Comments
Regardless of cryptocurrency, any reputable, legal business will keep your privacy if what you host on their network is legal.
Keep in mind that they are new. Many questions are unknown, compared to a well established and trusted provider: how to they really resist to external presure to sensor you or keep your private data... private? Do they have the technical means to really do so, even though they would like to? etc.
Exactly. If you're looking to host something illegal, the question isn't the same, but if it's legal, well established providers in decent jurisdictions should be fine. If the provider is not too small, their setup can be more secure than the usual VHMCS/Solus combo. Scaleway or Netcup for example can be good options if you're looking for something in the EU.
Theory.
Good luck getting a VPS
from NetCup.
(I like NetCup and have a nice VPS from them myself but they are known to be particular re. (proof of) identity)
AFAIK there aren't many providers selling VPS to anonymous customers, and with those who do you usually pay a price for anonymity - and that, anonymity, seems to be what you want; maybe privacy on top.
With Incognet / @MannDude you really can get and pay for a VPS totally anonymously, no fuss, no "but".
I benchmarked his VPS (you can find the results and mini-review in his thread) and was quite pleased with the results/performance. In fact easily in the top 10%.
As I've also purchased a VPS I have some experience with them and can report that I'm very happy with their support too.
TL;DR If you really want anonymity and good performance IncogNet is the place to go, period.
Netcup good example for "privacy focused" host?
Its a complete opposite. They are example of strict host that requires most info and if they are not sure you will also need to proof your address with documents etc. that way they dont get abusers and spammers often.
BuyVM 4GB is $15. If you need storage you can add Slabs which cost $1.25 for 256GB.
You can pay with crypto and input random address etc. and they wont make any problems.
They also can provide solid DDoS protection from path.net for $3.
All of this fits perfectly under your budget.
@jsg absolutely right, anonymity is what I am after. And Yes, I don't actually have problems choosing Incognet for that.
@AXYZE thanks for the suggestion! TBH I don't want to provide fake info when it's not really the type of service the provider offers. I was a BuyVM client before and I remember that they take fraud very seriously.
Thanks for all of your input!
LG-KVM-6144 is about $21.70/mo if paid yearly and gets you 2 very fast vCores, 6 GB memory, 55 GB (quite decent) NVMe and 20 TB traffic with DDOS protection. I'm quite confident that another $8/mo will get you an NVMe upgrade to 125 or maybe even 150 GB, and you'd be still within your $30/mo limit - and all of that with 100% anonymity.
If you are paranoid (no offense, just normal lingo in ITSec) you can order and manage the VPS via a VPN or socks proxy.
Did miss the part about anonymity in @op's post. Anonymity and privacy are totally different matters, and the point I was trying to make is that security - at the host level - matters if you really care about your privacy. You are more likely to encounter that with a serious host than with a random guy setting up SolusVM on a bunch of rented dedis, even though it won't be easy (but far from impossible) to be anonymous when renting a VPS/dedi with a serious and well established provider.
It totally depends what you threat model is and what is the worse issue you want to avoid. If a snapshot of your container being acquired - legally or not - by an adversary is not an issue, most cheap + "anonymous" hosts will likely do. If you want your data to be somewhat safer than that, it's going to be either expensive (njalla ain't cheap) or more complicated.
Yup, in case of security netcup is the best. They know what they are doing, they are subbrand of Anexia (pretty strong name in b2b), have their own seperated panels (one for billing, second for managing vps) with 2FA...
They are just very strict about who can join, if he wants to pay with crypto then this is no-go for them.
Thanks for the recommendations. We're small and relatively new, but I've personally been in the industry in one form or another for 10 years or so. I was working at Arvixe as my first gig back in... 2010 or so. Others involved have similar experience.
We're a small operation, sure, but we try our best. Personally, I just think privacy should be normalized and I hate the stigma that seeking privacy is seen as a negative thing.
I will just add, for good anonymity, you usually need to pay extra for that ability. You don't just want a host that 'might' ignore you, but specifically stay in your corner. I'm highly doubtful though that this is legal though or you would have found a few more hosts.
You can give a try to those hostings allow freedom of speech, adult content (NO CP!!), DMCA Ignored.
https://alexhost.com/vps/ (allow extreme right website, freedom of speech, also allow controversial websites)
https://flokinet.is (be careful they dont allow anyhing against vaccines which is ridiculous)
https://buyvm.net (host dailystormer,good to go)
I'm still testing out some of the 'big dogs' like Njala, and even though we're a competitor I'll give a quick unbiased review:
2 days, 4 hours ago
. No response. It was opened on Thursday, before the holiday and before the weekend.So, I'll give them a thumbs up for their home brewed platform. It looks nice, it works well it seems. It's simple and elegant. Service performance I'm sure would be fine for a static, low traffic website and not much else.
I'll be doing a more thorough testing and comparison of Njala as well as the other big dog providers in this area for simple things like usability, performance, support, etc.
This will allow us to see where we can improve, what features are common elsewhere that perhaps we should consider as well, and at the very least give us some marketing material if they all perform as poorly as above. Places like OrangeSite, 1984Hosting and other top providers in the privacy market that aren't LowEnd providers will all be tested since that's our actual market.
Hands down @MannDude is a better guy than any of us think ourselves to be. Chill, no drama, strong commitment to the values he claims, honest to a fault. Even if you voted for Ralph Nader he'd consider it not relevant to his job. IncogNet is who I'm shilling for this year.
Really appreciate doing a benchmark on them! @MannDude you're right, the performance was very far from my Incognet instance
With Njalla, I actually liked the JID-based approach for domain registration. The choice of OTR seems to be odd, but I'm not well verse on that, but still better than choosing email especially if the xmpp server doesn't log IPs.
While still on anonymity, whmcs does take a lot of IP logs even with tickets, nothing a VPN can resolve unless I actually wasn't connected!
supplementary it must be added, flokinet.is, is:
Njalla aka Tucows reseller drops u faster than a hot potato. It's just overpriced whois privacy.
Reverse proxy with local caching should perform quite well. Expensive for what it is technically speaking sure, but I assume you pay for their lawyers (i.e. for a shield rather than a server).
expensive.
Care to tell? Seems like you had a tough experience with them and I'm quite curious.
Netcup share your info with debt collector if you don't pay.
Hosts often sell clients info eventually anyway. This is especially true for low end hosts.
Historically, some lowend hosts sold clients' info for a steam game even.
The question is, who will use Netcup for privacy? No sense, is the same of using hosting from Hostgator, GoDaddy for Privacy...
Flokinet they advertise they are freedom of speech, but banned anti-vaxx from their network, or reject them. That is stupid thing, ridiculous! No matter what for a Hosting that defends "freedom of speech".
it is very doubtful to see and read this when they say they support freedom of expression, specially for @FlokiNET @FlokiNETis (I don't know their real account)
So the problem with Alexhost is the routing. You have in Netherland around 50ms to alexhost and from alexhost to other server like Google 30-40 Ms.
If you know make an VPN you have arround 100ms latency. And thats a big crap if you would like to upload. For example to the Usenet
Hum; it's different. Germany isn't necessarily a bad jurisdiction. Anonymity is another problem though, and of course on that front they aren't the best provider.
Anyway the idea wasn't to recommend Netcup per se, but to shed some light on the poor technical knowledge of many "privacy conscious" providers, who rely on commercial software that might pause a security risk, making data leaks far from impossible. Which is not something someone privacy conscious would enjoy.
Not a problem if the goal is to be anonymous and the service is registered using random mail/address and accessed through some really anonymous VPNs (good luck!), TOR or similar solutions. But again, privacy of your data on the server has nothing to do with your ability to easily register using a fake name and VPN...
For most uses (non illegal ones) a serious provider who will handle your personal data really safely will result in quite a good level of privacy.
moldova is not a developed country in terms of the internet, electricity is expensive. The number of ports (channels) 20Gbps, 40Gbps in germany, amsterdam or the united states is cheaper than 20Gbps in Moldova...
If you go to read on the internet, the government doesn't even care about certain places in the city of moldova are abandoned, cultural centers, historical are all badly treated... Moldova is a developed country, but not as much as germany, amsterdam, italy. It is perhaps one of the countries in Europe where connectivity continues to be low or unavailable, at the moment most providers only have 10Gbps.
But in terms of privacy, and content accepting Moldova is an excellent country.
This could be the cause and reason of Alexhost (they use Voxility) have those issues in routing.
flokinet can not be recommended. just check twitter from flokinet boss kolja weber (https://twitter.com/frelsisbaratta). he (and his company) do not seem to be neutral but rather left-green activists. therefore watch out who you entrust your data to.
We'll be reselling NameCrane, @Francisco 's registry when ready. One of the reasons our domains are manually approved now is because we're reselling Namecheap and try to filter out some crud that may get the entire account axed.
But in regards to how it works, that is what a privacy focused domain is. You're paying a 3rd party to order the domain for you, with their information. Domains registered through us use our address and company name which is on record with Namecheap. I imagine Njala does exactly the same with Tucows.
Any ETA on this?
Unsure. I know @Francisco is working on it. Maybe he'll give a public ETA to tease everyone with.
BuyVM is strict only if you pay via CC/PayPal. If you pay crypto, they don't care
There is also https://cockbox.org/ but not so reliable, always keep a backup somewhere else.
You can also use epik/sibyl/terrahost, they won't give your info willingly, but their security is trash and they will get hacked anyway thus leaking ur info