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VPS hosting

VPS-2

VPS-2 is the workhorse tier — two vCPU, four gigabytes of error-correcting memory, sixty gigabytes of NVMe storage, three terabytes of monthly transfer. It is the smallest machine on which a memory-hungry stack like Mailcow, Searx, or a Postgres-backed publication runs comfortably without swap, and is the tier most journalists and small newsrooms settle on when the static-site era ends.

$16 per month

Order this plan → No KYC · No DMCA · Crypto only
  • 2 vCPU (AMD EPYC)
  • 4 GB DDR4 ECC
  • 60 GB NVMe SSD
  • 3 TB / month

Specification

Processor
2 vCPU (AMD EPYC)
Memory
4 GB DDR4 ECC
Storage
60 GB NVMe SSD
Bandwidth
3 TB / month
IPv4 addresses
1
IPv6
yes
Virtualization
KVM
Uplink
1 Gbps
Uptime SLA
99.9%
Operating systems
Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky, Fedora, Whonix

Who this plan suits

A working publication with a CMS, a moderate-traffic dissident blog with a few thousand readers a day, a Mastodon instance for a hundred-or-so contributors, a mid-traffic Matrix homeserver, a small Bitwarden vault for a research team, a self-hosted Nextcloud for an investigative cell that needs document collaboration outside Google's reach. The tier matches the moment a project stops being a single static page and becomes a small running service with state.

It is undersized for a production CMS with a working comment system, daily article publishing, and a search index against tens of thousands of pieces. It is undersized for a leak archive that ingests submissions hourly. VPS-4 is the honest tier for that workload, and we would rather move a customer up than keep them at a tier where the database starts queuing. VPS-1 remains the right answer for a single Ghost instance with no comments.

Where this plan can be operated

VPS-2 can be deployed in Iceland or Switzerland. For a working publication, Iceland's IMMI posture and the Resolution 23/138 framework are the cleaner choice — the Althingi has historically refused to import foreign press-suppression instruments, and the Höfundalög (Icelandic copyright statute) does not contain a notice-and-takedown obligation that maps cleanly onto a DMCA notice. Switzerland's revFADP and the Federal Constitution Article 13 produce comparable outcomes through a different statutory route.

For a working CMS, the practical question is reader latency. Switzerland is the better choice for a project whose readership is concentrated in central or southern Europe; Iceland is the better choice for a project whose threat model places weight on the operator-jurisdiction's geographical and treaty distance from a likely adversary. The full comparative dossier covers both axes. Either jurisdiction can be selected at order time and changed by reprovisioning if the working assumption later turns out to be wrong.

What the operator sees, and what it does not

The operator's metadata surface on VPS-2 is identical to VPS-1: billing email, signup IP, the hostname you set, hypervisor-level system metrics, and aggregate inbound/outbound traffic counters. The KVM hypervisor publishes resource utilisation but no application-layer information; we do not run an out-of-band guest agent that reaches into the running VM. The headroom on VPS-2 is what changes the operational story — there is enough memory to run an encrypted Mailcow or a Postgres-backed CMS without sliding into swap.

What we cannot see, and what a sober operator never claims they cannot see by gentleman's agreement alone: anything inside an encrypted volume, anything inside the VM's memory, the contents of your TLS streams, the application-layer logs that you keep on the VM. We support payment in Monero, Lightning, on-chain Bitcoin, or cash by envelope; the recommendation for a working publication that wants the cleanest financial surface is Monero or cash, in that order — Monero gives an immediate confirmation, cash gives the cleanest separation but takes a few business days in transit.

Jurisdictions

The offering is available from the jurisdictions listed below. The choice between them is made at the order step; this section discloses what the choice is, so the reader knows before the form opens.

Ordering this plan

The order step confirms the jurisdiction, the payment rail, and the contact detail before any service is provisioned. Questions about the plan or migration ahead of an order go through the contact form.

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