Regular hosting has many benefits, but it also comes with risks. For instance, your business is subject to regulations in your home country, some of which might restrict your content or force you to give up your identity. In contrast, offshore hosting allows you to host your content online without having to comply with restrictions that don’t help your website.
An offshore hosting solution allows you to host your websites on servers in countries with lax hosting regulations. These countries allow hosting providers to offer hosting services without asking their clients too many questions. The companies can also ignore DMCA takedown requests.
If you are hosting content on subjects that are not generally accepted, such as gambling, tobacco, alcohol, or adult material, then offshore web hosting is perfect for you. It is also ideal for content creators and online business owners who wish to remain anonymous. This article will show you the ten best offshore hosting providers that provide complete anonymity, ensure your website remains online, and offer the best hosting experience.
Short on Time? Check Our Top Offshore Hosting Providers
The Best Offshore Hosting Services of 2023 (Bought and Tested)
UltaHost is known for its unbeatable performance, affordable prices, 55-second instant server launches, premium SSD-backed servers, and unlimited bandwidth. It also offers advanced security features, full root access, and a variety of free and paid features.
- Overall score: 4.8
- Features: 4.8
- Support: 4.9
- User Friendly: 4.8
- Pricing: 4.8
- Reliability: 4.9
Overall score – 4.8: UltaHost is a US-based hosting provider that was founded in 2018. Although it is fairly new to the market compared to other providers, it has proven itself as one of the best hosting providers offering DMCA-ignored Linux VPS plans among its long list of services. Additionally, it offers managed offshore hosting for both Linux and Windows. Depending on their OS, customers can choose from Hestia or CyberPanel, which are free, or go for the paid Plesk or cPanel control panels.
Features – 4.8: Some key features of UltaHost is that it provides SSD-backed offshore web hosting, multiple data centers located all across the globe, managed servers, dedicated IPs, 24/7 support, BitNinja Security, free SSL Certificates, unlimited bandwidth, Cloudflare CDN, free daily backups, and scalable DDR4 RAM.
Support – 4.9: Customer Support is available to users via UltaHost’s live chat, ticketing system, phone, and email support. UltaHost also has an amazing knowledge base and FAQ section for each service. Additionally, UltaHost has a blog where users can read about many relevant topics. The customer support experts of UltaHost are available 24/7/365.
User-friendly: 4.8: UltaHost has been dubbed as a provider that is simple to navigate and easy to use. It offers its users the cPanel control panel, which is known to be extremely beginner-friendly. Additionally, it offers managed servers, which means that all the technical aspects are taken care of by UltaHost, and customers do not have to worry and can focus on their business.
Pricing – 4.8: The cheapest UltaHost Offshore hosting plan is its Shared Starter plan, which will cost you $3.29 per month. You can choose to get a monthly or an annual subscription. Both billing plans come with discounts, and you can save up to 25% with a monthly or up to 40% with a yearly subscription. The Shared Starter plan comes with 1 GB RAM, one domain, 30GB NVMe SSD, unlimited bandwidth, free daily backups, and free SSL Certificates. All plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee and can be paid for with Bitcoin.
Reliability – 4.9: UltaHost offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee and has one of the best performances across all industry standards. Additionally, it employs modern systems across all its servers and maintains data centers in Canada, the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, India, and the European Union. Also, UltaHost provides automated daily backups with full server snapshots, CDN, SSD NVMe Disk Drives, and unlimited bandwidth.
Additional parameter – Best performance offshore hosting provider: UltaHost has the best performance in the offshore web hosting game. It provides customers with state-of-the-art managed servers powered by ultra-optimized 14th-generation Dell servers. Additionally, it guarantees a 99.9% uptime and uses SSD NVMe disk drives for storage. Also, it provides its customers with unlimited bandwidth, server launches in 55 seconds, a built-in cache mechanism, and full root access. Additionally, it offers customers many free features, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and accepts Bitcoin as a payment option.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- 55-second server launch
- CDN add-on
- HTTP/2 enabled servers
- SSD NVMe disk drives
- 24/7 support
- Excellent server infrastructure
- Unlimited application installation
- Malware scans and reports
- Support in multiple languages
- SSH and SFTP access
- Advanced security
- Many free features
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons
- The CDN add-on is not free in the Basic Windows VPS plan
- Monthly plans do not come with free domain transfers
KoDDoS is a premium offshore hosting provider that was founded in 2007 and has its headquarters in Hong Kong. It offers numerous top-quality services, including medium-risk hosting, high-risk hosting, offshore shared hosting, and dedicated offshore web hosting. However, its real area of expertise is DDoS protection, and it offers DDoS proxy protection and DDoS-protected colocation. It’s the perfect place for businesses that work with highly-sensitive data and are popular targets for hackers.
- Overall score: 4.7
- Features: 4.7
- Support: 4.8
- User Friendly: 4.7
- Pricing: 4.6
- Reliability: 4.6
Features: KoDDoS offers many premium features, with a focus on security and DDoS protection. Some of the features it offers include 24/7 monitoring, uninterrupted application layer (layer 7) operations, and advancements, SSL, server management, medium-risk, and high-risk hosting, traffic filtering, free migration, DDoS proxy protection, and DDoS-protected colocation. However, we gave it a 4.7 score because not all plans come with a dedicated IP address.
Support: KoDDoS offers 24/7 customer support that is available via live chat, email, and phone. You can also contact them through Facebook and Twitter direct messages. However, we gave it a 4.8 score because some of the information on the website is unclear regarding the customer support team and because it asks customers to wait for 24h for a response due to time differences.
User Friendly: KoDDoS is quite easy to use. It offers many one-click install applications with all its plans and has a modern website that is easy to navigate. It also provides SEO tools, fully managed support and the cPanel control panel. We only gave it a 4.7 score because some of the control panels come at an additional cost.
Pricing: The cheapest plan that KoDDoS offers is its Mini Plan A offshore web hosting plan. It costs $8.95 per month and includes 20 GB of Raid-10 storage, 300 GB of premium bandwidth, unlimited MySQL, email, and FTP, two addon, and two parked domains. However, KoDDoS has more expensive plans overall, which is why we gave it a 4.6 score.
Reliability: KoDDoS is known among its customers as a secure and reliable provider. It has an amazing redundant network with quality hardware from Juniper Networks and Cisco. It also provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee and has data centers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Washington, the USA, and Hong Kong. All of its servers are powered by LiteSpeed, and users can take advantage of its Cloudflare CDN and the Softaculous auto-installer. However, we gave it a 4.6 score because it only has three data centers.
Additional parameter – Remote protection: 5.0: Remote protection is crucial when it comes to offshore hosting because it helps protect websites from hackers, ensures your data is safe and enables you to safely conduct your business online. KoDDoS does an excellent job in this department, as it provides special high-risk hosting plans, excellent DDoS protection, DDoS-protected servers, DDoS proxy protection, and DDoS-protected colocation. So, it’s no surprise that we gave it a 5.0 rating in this area.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- 24/7 customer support
- LiteSpeed web servers
- Unlimited MySQL, email, and FTP
- Raid-10 storage
- Hardware from Juniper Networks and Cisco
- DDoS proxy protection
- DDoS-protected colocation
- Cloudflare CDN
- Softaculous auto-installer
- 24/7 monitoring
- Server management
- Many different plans
Cons
- Limited information on the company
- 24h-wait for a customer support response
- Expensive plans
- Overall score: 4.8
- Features: 4.8
- Support: 4.9
- User Friendly: 4.8
- Pricing: 4.5
- Reliability: 4.9
Overall score – 4.8: VSYS Host – Virtual Systems LLC is a hosting provider based in Kyiv, Ukraine. It has been online since 2009 and takes great pride in providing 100% anonymous offshore hosting services with servers in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The provider owns all of its hardware servers and network equipment. The provider also operates thousands of IPv4 and has its own AS network.
Features – 4.8: VSYS Host offers many features, including 24/7 server monitoring, DDoS protection, Bitcoin as a payment method, on-demand custom hardware configurations, free setup, migration support, client’s ISO Image Installation, and full root access with IPMI v.2.
Support – 4.9: VSYS Host provides excellent customer support to its users, with an expert team that is available 24/7. Customers can contact the team at any time and get a quick and helpful response. You can contact the VSYS Host support team via its ticketing system or live chat. An important thing to know is that only the VSYS Host expert team members have access to the hardware and network, ensuring your privacy and security.
User-friendliness – 4.8: VSYS Host is an extremely user-friendly provider. You can expect help and support from its expert team at every step of the way. Additionally, the VSYS Host website is well-organized and easy to navigate, so you can instantly find a plan that suits you and see the features you will get with each plan.
Pricing – 4.5: This provider does not allow for resellers, as customers rent the hardware and network equipment directly from VSYS Host. The cheapest offshore web hosting plan that this provider offers is the VH-Medium plan, which costs $5 per month. It comes with 1GB disk space, five domains, two sites, five MySQL databases, an SSL Certificate, and 24/7 customer support.
Reliability – 4.9: VSYS Host provides a 99.97% uptime, which is backed up by the most up-to-date SLA guarantee. Its network infrastructure is located in Kyiv, Ukraine, in a Tier III data center, with multiple top-tier uplinks.
Additional parameter – Best value for money offshore hosting provider: Because VSYS Host owns its server hardware and network equipment, it does not have a reseller markup. This directly impacts the prices that you have to pay, and in the case of VSYS Host, they are lower and more affordable than most providers. Additionally, because of the unique optimal balance VSYS Host has due to the inbound traffic made by local clients vs. outbound by offshore clients, it can maintain a great equilibrium between affordability and service quality.
VSYS Host is known for the privacy and 100% anonymity it offers to customers, which is made possible because it owns its own hardware servers and network equipment. This allows the provider to offer its services at amazing prices, ensuring customers the best value for money.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Best value for money
- Excellent 24/7 customer support
- A 99.97% uptime guarantee
- On-demand volumetric DDoS attack protection
- Custom hardware configurations available on-demand
- Separate VLAN on-demand
- 1Gbps premium uplink
- Multiple payment methods, including Bitcoin
- Free SSL Certificate
- Relaxed content regulations because of local legislation
- No setup fees
- A 40-day money-back guarantee
Cons
- Limitations to CPU and RAM
- No dedicated IP for the cheapest plan
KnownSRV is a European hosting provider that has established a reputation for its super-responsive customer support.
- Overall score – 4.6
- Features – 4.5
- Support – 5
- User Friendly – 4.5
- Pricing – 4.5
- Reliability – 4.5
Overall score – 4.6: Although KnownSRV is still a relatively new web hosting provider, they have established a good reputation with their reliable hosting services and excellent customer service. They offer shared, VPS, and dedicated server hosting solutions and operate multiple data centers in Luxemburg, Romania, and the Netherlands.
Features – 4.5: KnownSRV has four shared hosting plans available with the following features available on all plans: 5 GB RAID10 SSD storage, unlimited FTP accounts, emails, MySQL databases, 30 GB premium bandwidth DDoS protection, and PHP and CGI support.
Support – 5: The customer support is superb. KnownSRV offers a live chat, knowledge base, and support ticket system. The support team typically replies in less than 15 minutes, regardless of the issue.
User Friendly – 4.5: KnownSRV offers a free website migration service, the Softaculous app installer, and a cPanel installation to make web hosting easy for you. They also offer super responsive customer support to help you with any issues.
Pricing – 4.5: Price-wise, KnownSRV is an excellent web host. The basic plan costs only $2.95/mo and offers 5 GB RAID10 SSD space, unmetered bandwidth, cPanel, Softaculous, unlimited domain names and email accounts, and free website migration.
Reliability – 4.5: There is a 99.9% uptime SLA, which is promising. They also offer excellent website speed and server performance. Those in the U.S. might experience slightly slower speeds since the company’s data centers are in the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Romania.
Additional parameter – Customer support: Offshore web hosts are notorious for being hard to reach. KnownSRV stands out with its super helpful and responsive customer support. They also offer total data privacy, website security, and greater anonymity.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Highly responsive customer support ticket system
- Greater anonymity, privacy, and security
- Affordably priced and competitive even with non-offshore hosts
- Excellent uptime for an offshore host
Cons:
- Limited money-back guarantee
- Few servers worldwide
ZYNOO is a Bulgarian offshore web hosting provider that offers Shared, VPS and Dedicated offshore hosting. Its servers are located in Sofia, Bulgaria, and are powered by enterprise-level hardware. Additionally, it operates modern Tier III+ carrier-neutral data centers, which customers from the European Union and beyond to Asia and Africa can take advantage of, considering Bulgaria’s proximity to the two continents.
- Overall score: 4.7
- Features: 4.8
- Support: 4.7
- User Friendly: 4.6
- Pricing: 4.7
- Reliability: 4.7
Features: ZYNOO offers many paid and free features to its customers, including free DDoS protection of up to 500+ Gbps, unlimited bandwidth, an ultra-fast network, a free database, script, and file transfer, RAID-10 SSD storage, server monitoring, and full root access. However, we gave it a 4.8 rating because SSD storage and free DDoS protection are not available for all dedicated offshore web hosting plans.
Support: ZYNOO’s 24/7/365 customer support can be accessed via tickets, live chat, and its designated Client Area. Additionally, ZYNOO has an extensive knowledge base where customers can search for solutions to their issues. We gave it a 4.7 rating because it does not provide phone support.
User Friendly: ZYNOO is an easy-to-navigate provider which offers the Softaculous auto-installer and the cPanel control panel, which is a favorite among beginners and developers alike. However, we gave it a 4.6 rating because its knowledge base can be a bit difficult to navigate.
Pricing: The cheapest offshore hosting plan is the Business plan, which starts at $5.95 per month. It comes with 30 GB of SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, 2 GB RAM, 1.5 vCore, and the ability to host up to 20 domains. However, we gave it a 4.7 rating because it’s a bit pricier compared to other providers.
Reliability: ZYNOO is among the few providers on the market that offer a 100% uptime guarantee on all its services. Additionally, its infrastructure is supported by enterprise-level hardware and uses LiteSpeed web server software across all servers. However, we gave ZYNOO a 4.7 rating here because it only has one data center.
Additional parameter – Data center location: 4.2: The location of the data center is crucial for downtime, website availability, and latency issues. The closer a customer is to the location, the lesser the chances are of experiencing either one. Because of this, we gave a 4.2 rating to ZYNOO because, despite it being close to European and some Asian and African countries, customers outside these regions are highly likely to experience latency issues and downtime.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- A 100% uptime
- 24/7/365 customer support with excellent response times
- Free DDoS protection of up to 500+ Gbps
- Free database, script, and file transfer
- LiteSpeed web servers
- Enterprise-level hardware
- Softaculous auto install
- Unlimited databases, email accounts, and FTP accounts
- Server monitoring
Cons
- No phone support
- Only one data center
Ranking comparison between the Top Providers
Best Offshore Hosting Services: Final Recommendations
Offshore hosting services are ideal for people who want to host their websites without fear of anti-privacy laws or DMCA takedown notices. Many providers offer this service, so you should take your time to select the best one for your needs. From our research, the best offshore web hosting provider is Shinjiru. The company offers complete anonymity even when you are making payment. They also offer affordable hosting solutions and excrement website performance.
Other excellent providers to consider are AbeloHost and BlueAngelHost. If you are still unsure, you can check out the section on how to pick the best offshore web hosting services. When you have settled on two or three providers, test them by subscribing to their plans. Use the money-back guarantee period to test out the features. If you are impressed, you can continue to use the service. If you aren’t, you can request a refund.
Key Points to Consider When Choosing/Key Takeaways
We used a strict set of criteria to select web hosts for this list of the best offshore web hosting services. You can read the full criteria at the bottom of the article. To simplify, we examined and ranked each provider using five points: features, support, user-friendliness, pricing, and reliability.
- Features: We looked for specific features such as data centers in multiple countries, daily backups, domain privacy, hosting resources on each plan, and security solutions. We also consider extra things such as free SSL certificates, email hosting, SSD drives, control panels, and one-click installations.
- Support: The provider’s support team should be available 24/7 via live chat, email, phone, and ticketing systems.
- User-friendliness: You don’t have to be a web guru to enjoy anonymity. We ensure that all the services provided are easy to use.
- Pricing: Reliable offshore hosting is not cheap, but it shouldn’t be outrageously expensive. We ensure the features of each plan are commensurate with the price. We also look out for hosts that allow anonymous payment options.
- Reliability: Offshore services have a bad reputation for being slow and unreliable, but the providers here will deliver impressive performance.
How do we rank, and how should you choose your offshore hosting provider?
- Types of Hosting Offered5%
- Uptime Commitment8%
- Speed Optimization9%
- Available Space and Bandwidth7%
- Scalability Options6%
- Security Enhancements7%
- Ease of Use8%
- Offshore hosting-specific support12%
- Developer Tools and Extras5%
- User Reviews30%
- Starting price3%
Our in-house experts collated all the offshore hosting providers and ranked them based on crucial parameters. This list included both popular web hosts and those new to the market.
We assigned percentages to each factor based on their importance to an offshore web hosting service. The rate of a factor indicates how important it is.
- Types of Hosting Offered (5%): Most providers offer shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated server hosting. Some also offer reseller hosting.
- Uptime Commitment (8%): Ideally, the uptime commitment should be 99.95% or higher. However, there are cases where a provider offers less than that on its lower-tiered plans. We recommend that you only go for plans that offer at least a 99.95% uptime guarantee. It should be easy to get an affordable plan based on that criteria, as many providers offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee on their entry plans.
- Speed Optimization (9%): Many think offshore web hosting solutions lead to slow-loading websites. That is not true. This article’s web hosts will provide impressive website load speed. However, the distance between the server location and your audience will determine how fast the website loads. For instance, if you are hosting your website on a server in the Netherlands and your target audience is in the United States, the website might load slower than it should. But even at that, your website will not load slowly. Many hosts employ CDN, caching, and SSD-only servers to ensure optimal loading speeds regardless of the location of your target audience.
- Available Space and Bandwidth (7%): Most people who require offshore hosting do so because they want to host content on their websites. So before you sign up for a plan, ensure that the storage allocation is sufficient for your needs. You should consider the disc storage, RAM size, and available bandwidth.
- Scalability Options (6%): All websites grow over time. So it would help if you had a provider that allows you to increase the limits of your hosting resources. You can add more resources to your plan or upgrade to a higher one. The web host should ensure that the upgrades do not cause downtimes or performance lags.
- Security Enhancements (7%): Websites hosted on offshore platforms are often the targets of multiple attacks. It would be best if you had a provider that employs online and physical security measures to secure their services and protect your site. They should also take legal measures to protect your data and identity.
- Ease of Use (8%): The best offshore web hosts are usually user-friendly. However, the hosting you choose will influence how easy the hosting solution is. A shared hosting plan is more user-friendly than an unmanaged Offshore VPS hosting plan. However, some providers make it a duty to make their dashboards as friendly as possible.
- Offshore hosting-specific support (12%): Some key things to look out for are 24/7 support, anonymous payment options, data privacy, and data requirements. The best web offshore hosting providers require very little data from you. Some only require a video email to keep you updated on your website. You should also ensure you can reach the customer support team when you need help.
- Developer Tools and Extras (5%): Developer tools are essential for offshore web hosting, but some developers want to host and manage web applications while staying anonymous. If that defines you or your brand, you should look for providers that are developer friendly.
- User Reviews (30%): user reviews often paint a vivid picture of how well an offshore hosting provider has performed over time. If a provider has breached customer data, they will likely do it again. So we check the experiences of past and present users to have a complete picture of the web hosting company. We pay particular attention to how they handle DMCA Reuters, the data privacy policies, and overall performance.
- Starting price (3%): Whether you are on a budget or have money to burn, you want to ensure the price measures up to the value you get. The easy way to do this is to compare the plan’s cost to the features included. Some providers offer lifetime domains, so you should consider that when calculating the cost.
What to look for in an offshore web hosting provider
There are many reasons why people seek offshore web hosting. It could be because they want more flexible privacy laws than the ones offered in the United States. It could be to keep their identity private or bypass DMCA laws. Whatever the reason, there are vital features to consider based on your needs.
- Server location: The first thing to consider is where the web host servers are. Some countries have privacy laws that are just as strict as the United States. Countries with flexible web hosting regulations include Russia, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands. Hence, it is no surprise that most offshore web hosting providers have servers in at least one of those countries. If they don’t offer offshore hosting in such countries, we recommend you look for another web host.
- Multilingual support: Since most offshore web shots are primarily based in east European countries, you want to ensure language is not a barrier. Even experienced users can get into issues when the support team needs help understanding their language. Thankfully, most web hosts offer support in English. So if you speak English well, you are good to go.
- Payment option: Payment is crucial as international transactions can be a significant hassle. Furthermore, they can leave a paper trail that can reveal the identity of website owners that wish to remain hidden from the public. For this reason, many providers offer multiple payment channels, including cryptocurrency. Check the payment options to see if they align with your preference.
- Data requirement: There is no sense in giving up your data to the web host if your motivation for offshore web hosting was to stay anonymous. Ensure that the web host does not attach your name to the website. Most of the web hosts in this article require very little of your data. Some only require a valid email address and name.
- Server performance: When you are satisfied that the web host meets all your privacy and anonymity requirements, you should check their server performance. You can do this by reading expert reviews from other users and web experts or by testing the server’s performance yourself.
What is offshore hosting, and who is it for?
Offshore hosting is a web hosting solution where the web hosting provider hosts the client’s sites on offshore servers. Offshore servers mean that the server’s location is outside the client’s country.
However, offshore hosting can also mean web hosting on servers located in countries with flexible web hosting regulations. These countries generally do not require providers to comply with DMCA requests. These countries include Russia, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, Bulgaria, and Luxembourg.
For this reason, offshore hosting is also called DMCA-ignored hosting.
People have different motivations for using offshore hosting. The categories of people who seek offshore hosting include:
- Website owners who want to avoid legal residency and local regulations
- Individuals and brands who want to keep their identities hidden from the public
- Those seeking an uncensored platform to share ideas
- Those seeking a platform to share controversial content and media files
Generally, you can use offshore hosting in any situation. However, it is popular mainly with website owners who want to keep their identities unknown or to operate without strict regulations.