As a person working for a privacy-conscious web-hosting company, I receive lots of questions on how to buy a truly anonymous web-hosting, VPS or a dedicated server. Below I’ll try to sum up the most important points to consider in the anonymous ordering process. Before we start I’d like to warn you that nothing is 100% anonymous and untraceable so if you’re planning something criminal like selling drugs, doing child porn or similar stuff my advice is: don’t do it – most probably you will be located and prosecuted.

First, you need to know that you should avoid US- and UK-based hosts, because of the national surveillance programs these countries are running. It’s also not recommended to keep your data in one of the countries of the so-called “fourteen eyes”, an intelligence collection and sharing group. “Fourteen eyes” organization consists of the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. This group of countries has signed agreements to spy and monitor each other’s citizens and there’s a very high probability that your data can be leaked and connection wiretapped by the government agencies without your consent.

Next step, you’d like to make sure that the provider you have chosen is well-established and reputable and will not disappear with your data. In any case, you should keep your offline backups at all times. You’d want to check when the company was established (also the domain age to make sure the company has been around for a while). You could also read some reviews online. However, you should take online reviews with a grain of salt as many companies offer paid reviews nowadays. Some negative publicity ordered by the competition is also not something completely unheard of.

Undoubtedly, the most important step is preparation for ordering, which includes registering a disposable or anonymous email address, getting a good VPN provider, which keeps no logs, perhaps also an RDP to use as a proxy to make an order. This step is really important as leaving your real IP at some point or having it recorded may lead to full exposure. For secure email you could use Tutanota or Protonmail. Make sure you sign up with a VPN provider with a no-logs-recorded policy and pay with crypto. For pre-sales inquiries you can use a secure messenger like Telegram or Signal with self-destructable chats. As an extra layer of security you can use a disposable RDP server.

Next, registration process. It goes without saying that the website has to be secure (https protocol) and there has to be some billing system installed. Provider using nulled scripts is a no-no as nulled scripts may contain backdoors and also lead to your info leaking and eventually being published online or used to blackmail you. Anonymous registration can be of several different types: email registration, where you only need a valid email address to register or a full one, containing your name, address etc but with a disclaimer that your info is not being checked. So, despite leaving obviously fake info, like John Doe for example, you still will get registered.

Moving on to the payment methods. Good sign is that the provider accepts Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency as a payment method. Some really paranoid people would want to pay with Monero, Zcash or some other privacy coin. Other anonymous payment methods are quite rare nowadays. I can think of prepaid cards (Paysafecard etc), good old cash or Western Union with fake sender’s name. The latter two however are unsafe as cash may disappear at the post office and WU transfer may get stuck if the provider will fail to receive it on time for example. You won’t be able to reclaim it as sender’s name is fake.

These are only some of the aspects of ordering a server anonymously. If you need any advice or assistance please don’t hesitate to contact us: [email protected]

By Jesus Cea, serveria.com