Offshore is a jurisdiction, not a spell
The bottom of this market sells a promise about what it will ignore. Underneath, it is frequently a resold instance on somebody else’s upstream account, in a country nobody mentioned, and the promise lasts exactly as long as the first serious complaint.
What people are actually buying
It is worth naming the requirement precisely, because the word offshore covers four different wants and only some of them are satisfied by geography.
All four of these are legitimate, and none of them are immunity.
Distance from a specific party
A former employer, a litigious competitor, a stalker, a local authority with a habit of informal requests. Distance genuinely helps here, and so does a provider that holds nothing about you.
Resistance to frivolous takedowns
Automated complaints are cheap to send and expensive to answer. What you want is an operator with a written policy and the spine to apply it, which is a property of the company rather than the country.
A legal process that is slow to cross borders
Some jurisdictions require a real request through real channels rather than an email to an abuse desk. That is a meaningful difference, and it is the one thing geography does reliably.
Content that would be refused at home
Political material, adult work, security research, archives that annoy somebody. Here the question is what a host refuses, and every host refuses something.
How the cheap end fails
These failures are common enough to be predictable, and every one of them is detectable before you pay rather than after.
Resold, not operated
The seller holds a reseller account with an upstream in an extremely ordinary country. One complaint to that upstream removes the whole node, your data included, and the person you paid has no more influence than you do.
The jurisdiction is three jurisdictions
Where the company is registered, where the hardware sits and where the transit is bought are often different places. The last of the three usually decides what happens to you, and it is the one nobody advertises.
No abuse desk that answers
Ignoring complaints does not make them stop; it escalates them upstream, where the response is a null route applied first and discussed later. An operator with no abuse process has outsourced your uptime to strangers.
Hardware from another decade
Chips from the middle of the last decade, spinning disks, and a shared gigabit sold as dedicated. Ask for the CPU model in writing and watch how long the answer takes.
Prepay a year, then find out
Steep discounts for annual payment, from an operator with a domain registered eight months ago and no refund window. The discount is funding the exit.
One person, one messaging app
Support is a single account on a chat network, with no company behind it and no second person who knows the passwords. That is fine until the day it is not.
What to check before prepaying
Seven checks, none of which require technical access. Any two bad answers should end the conversation.
| Check | How | A bad answer |
|---|---|---|
| Who operates the hardware | Ask which site the machine is in, and whether they own the racks | A refusal, or a country that changes between the sales page and the invoice |
| How long they have run | Domain age, a status history, a changelog with years in it | A company younger than the term they want you to prepay |
| What they refuse | Ask for the acceptable use policy and read all of it | A page claiming nothing is refused. That operator has not yet met a transit provider |
| Abuse handling | Ask what happens when a complaint arrives | We ignore them. The upstream will not, and the upstream decides |
| Refunds | Find the window, in days, in the terms | No window at all, or one that excludes crypto payments |
| The network | A looking glass, a route to your users, a sustained port test | No looking glass, and no answer about upstream capacity |
| Support before you buy | Send one technical question with a checkable answer | A reply after two days, or an answer that is confidently wrong |
When an offshore specialist beats us
We are permissive. We are not the most permissive operator on the market, deliberately.
Content we will not carry
Our acceptable use policy refuses attacks on third parties, child sexual abuse material and open relays. Everything else is between you and the law of the site you picked, but if your project needs a host that refuses nothing, that host is not us.
A flag we do not fly
Thirty-four sites in twenty-nine countries, and there are countries we have chosen not to enter. When the requirement is one specific jurisdiction, buy from an operator who is actually in it.
A payment method we do not accept
Cash by post, vouchers, gift cards and various exotic rails are all in use at that end of the market. We take crypto through OxaPay and nothing else.
Price, plainly
A resold instance costs a fraction of what we charge, because it is a fraction of what we run. If the budget is the constraint and the risk is acceptable to you, that is a rational trade and not a foolish one.
What we offer instead
Our answer to this market is unglamorous: choose the jurisdiction deliberately, operate the hardware ourselves, and write down what we will and will not do.
Sites chosen for legal texture, not only latency
Chișinău is our most requested jurisdiction for material that attracts complaints. Panama takes a notably literal view of what a subpoena is. Reykjavík runs on geothermal power with a short path to North America.
Our racks, our hypervisor
Every node in the fleet is hardware we specified and bought, in a site we contracted for. Nothing in the catalogue is resold from another provider under a different name.
A takedown policy you can read in advance
Short, specific, and identical at every site except where local law says otherwise. You should know what would remove your server before you buy it, not after somebody complains.
A canary and a refund window
The warrant canary has been signed every month since March 2023. First orders carry a seven day refund with no reason required, which is a better test than any promise on a sales page.
Questions
Yes, but less than the marketing suggests. Jurisdiction changes what process is required to compel a provider; it does not change what that provider has stored. A host in a strict country holding nothing about you is often the stronger position.
Chișinău, Panama City and Reykjavík, most often, with Zurich for people who want a jurisdiction more than they want cheap capacity. Zurich rack space is expensive and stock is rationed, which we mention before you fall in love with it.
Attacks on third parties, child sexual abuse material and open mail relays, at every site, without discussion. Beyond that we follow the law of the site you chose and nothing further, and we do not act on complaints that carry no legal weight.
Where we are legally permitted to notify you, we do. Where we are not, the transparency report and the canary are the mechanisms that remain, which is why both exist.
Pick the jurisdiction on purpose
Thirty-four sites across twenty-nine countries, all operated by us, all with the same published policy. Choose the country as carefully as the latency, because it usually matters more.