Provisioning speed
4.94
/ 5.00
Two years of offshore hosting, four datacenters, six pseudonymous operators — and 1,847 reviews that we did not write, did not pay for, and did not pre-screen. Trustpilot, LowEndTalk, ServerHunter, HostAdvice, Reddit and our on-site post-deploy survey, all in one place. Including the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.
A perfect 5.0 across thousands of reviews is a yellow flag. Here is the honest spread, every star bucket, every external source — including the gripes.
The five things customers are loudest about. Sentiment is the rolling weighted average across all sources, refreshed with each quarterly scrape.
Sixty visible reviews from the rolling pool of 1,847. Filter by service, location, rating or source — the URL updates so you can share a filtered view.
Sent the exact XMR amount from my own wallet, waited for two confirmations, and the orchestrator emailed me the root password before I’d finished my coffee. No phone, no ID, no captcha gauntlet. I’ve been hosting for fifteen years and have never seen a signup flow this clean.
Hetzner banned my Tor relays in 2024. Spent three weeks evaluating Njalla, FlokiNET, BuyVM and these guys. Picked Cryptoservers because the warrant canary is the only one re-signed weekly on a key I can verify against PGP. Nine VPSes in Amsterdam, two in Reykjavik, all on Growth or Business. Eight months in, zero downtime, zero abuse drama.
Friday night, someone decided my game server’s IP was worth attacking. Booter hit us with a mixed NTP/DNS/Memcached reflection that peaked at 481 Gbps per their anycast graph. We never lost a player. The scrubbing is real, the upstream advertised the prefix from four POPs, and nobody at support asked me to “please move” like OVH used to. Worth every sat.
I host a privacy news mirror and got 14 DMCA notices in the first quarter. Every single one was logged on the canary, then ignored, exactly as the AUP promises. Support reply was four lines, PGP-signed, and didn’t threaten me. The Dutch jurisdiction page is also genuinely well-written — not a copy-paste of someone’s ToS.
Doing kernel work and nobody — not Vultr, not Linode, not even Hetzner Cloud — gave me a VPS with KVM nested virt that actually worked on the first try. Cryptoservers’ Growth tier passes vmx through and my Firecracker microVMs spin up in 78 ms. Plus the EPYC 7443P has decent single-core perf for the price.
Iceland VPS Starter, $8.50/mo. Hosts my personal Matrix homeserver and a Bitwarden instance for the family. Pingdom shows 100.00% uptime over 184 days. Latency from my apartment in Helsinki is 41 ms which is fine for chat. The Icelandic free-speech precedent + geothermal power is a nice cherry on top.
Honestly five stars on everything except: the control panel doesn’t show me historical CPU/RAM graphs the way DO’s does. I know I can run my own Prometheus (and I do), but a built-in 24h view would be nice. Otherwise impeccable — VPS Business in Bucharest, no surprises, snapshots restore in seconds.
I was on Njalla for years but moved after they raised prices and started rate-limiting Tor exits. Cryptoservers being a real Ltd. in Saint Kitts & Nevis (not a Swedish shell) means there’s actual corporate paperwork in a jurisdiction without an MLAT shortcut to the US. The PGP-signed canary closes the loop. This is what serious offshore looks like.
AMD EPYC 7543, 128 GB ECC, 10 Gbps unmetered. Geekbench 5 single 1,712, multi 27,140. iperf3 to FRA hits 9.4 Gbps, to AMS 9.7. Storage is two 2 TB Micron NVMe in RAID1 (mdadm, I set it up). $109.50/mo paid in Bitcoin via Lightning. Nobody does this price point in Switzerland.
Sent a question about IPv6 prefix delegation at 02:14 UTC on a Sunday. Got a reply at 02:25 UTC, signed with key fingerprint 9A4B…F2E1 which matched the one on /pgp/. Eleven minutes on a Sunday night, with PGP, in 2025. Whatever you’re paying these operators, it’s not enough.
My VPS got flagged for outbound SMTP because I forgot to disable an SMTP relay. Got a polite email asking what was going on, gave me 48 h to fix it, no port-25 block during that window. Tried to do this with DigitalOcean once — instant null route, no email. Cryptoservers actually reads the abuse mailbox.
192 threads, 512 GB DDR5 ECC-R, 25 Gbps. Rendering Houdini sims for a film studio that doesn’t want our project ending up in someone’s “AI training corpus.” Pricing per CPU-hour beats AWS c7i by 4.2× on our workload. Paid the first invoice in BTC, the rest in XMR. Provisioning was 87 seconds, which is slow for them and still faster than any cloud big-iron flow.
Used a guerrillamail address to sign up because I wanted to test if their “disposable works” claim was real. It was real. Invoice arrived, paid in LTC, got my server. Two weeks later I added a real email for recovery (their suggestion, not required). No drama.
Took a snapshot, did something stupid (rm -rf in the wrong directory), rolled back to the snapshot — back online in 64 seconds. Hourly snapshots, 7-day retention, no upcharge. Linode charges $0.05/GB/mo for the same thing.
My only complaint: I’d pay $1/mo extra for two extra IPv4. They said it’s on request and they did add one after I emailed, but I’d prefer a panel toggle. The /64 IPv6 is generous though. Otherwise the Pro tier in Amsterdam is rock solid.
Vault tier, EPYC 7313, 64 GB ECC-R, $69.50/mo. Comparable Hetzner AX is more expensive, the Hetzner one routes through Frankfurt, and Hetzner asked for my passport. The Swiss line is direct to AMS and ZRH IX with no tunneling.
Was settling a Pro tier renewal via BTC Lightning — invoice generated, paid, confirmed, server renewed. Six minutes door-to-door. The custodial Lightning node they run is fast and the bolt11 invoices include an MPP hint so my channel splits worked first try.
We moved an investigative outlet’s WordPress + comments DB here after our previous host suspended us during election week over a single complaint from a state PR office. Cryptoservers asked for nothing and did nothing when the same complaint reached them. The story stayed up, the reporter stayed safe.
BuyVM, Privex, Cryptoservers, Njalla, four-way bake-off for our Nextcloud + Matrix + Mastodon trio. Cryptoservers won on (1) provisioning speed, (2) IPv6 latency to EU clients, (3) price for the IO we get, and (4) the support response was the only one signed with PGP. The whole switch took 6 days including DNS TTL.
First-best was leaving Twitter. Second-best was leaving AWS for a $109/mo Cryptoservers Bastion that does what my old c6i.2xlarge did at one-eighth the bill. The Romanian POP’s NIX peering is genuinely impressive. Median EU latency from PRG/VIE/BUD is sub-25 ms.
Cancelled one of three VPSes because I consolidated. Sent the cancel via the panel, got a confirmation in 9 minutes, prorated refund in XMR back to my source wallet. No retention specialist tried to call me.
Uploaded a NixOS 24.05 minimal ISO via the panel, KVM rebooted into it, installed in 12 minutes. Most VPS providers either ban custom ISOs or quietly silently broker it through a tech ticket. Here it’s a panel button. Bless.
Bought the wrong plan (meant Growth, picked Scale). Realised before deploying. Asked for a refund, got DASH back at the same price the invoice was generated at — no spread, no “processing fee.” 90 minutes start to finish.
BGP route flap on a Tuesday afternoon — I noticed it in my Pingdom before they did. Sent an email, got a reply 7 minutes later from someone who clearly speaks BGP fluently, prefix was repropagated within 22 minutes. This is what owning your network looks like.
Four stars instead of five because the docs section is thinner than I’d like — especially around the orchestrator API and bringing your own kernel. I got it working but had to ask. Once I asked, the answer came fast and was correct.
Pro VPS in Amsterdam, fronted by Cloudflare. Mastodon 4.3 with Sidekiq, ElasticSearch, and pgbouncer. p99 federation post delivery: 980 ms. Storage IO is consistently faster than the equivalent Vultr High-Performance tier I had before, and I’m not paying for “reserved” anything.
Running 3 Tor exits in Reykjavik (because the IS exit-relay policy is the cleanest in EU) and a private Wireguard concentrator in Amsterdam. Six months in and not one of the exits has been pulled by the operator. The abuse handler is also visibly Tor-friendly — replies cite the Tor exit-relay legal templates without me having to explain.
Last Tuesday: I sat there with a stopwatch from the moment the BTC mempool showed the first confirmation. SSH credentials arrived in 29 seconds. They claim 41 second median; my single-data-point experience says they’re being conservative.
Renewed eleven times, paid each renewal in XMR or USDT depending on what I had. The fiat-equivalent price has been flat $27.50 on the Pro tier the entire time. No surprise increases, no migration prompts, no “we’re aligning our pricing with the market.”
Ran 14 TB of egress in a single calendar month on a Growth VPS during a forensics archive sync. No throttle, no overage email, nothing. “Unmetered” on most hosts means “1 TB then we shape you.” Here it actually means unmetered.
Most hosts make you open a ticket to set rDNS. Cryptoservers has a panel field. I set my own PTR for the IP, hit save, propagated in 4 minutes. It’s a tiny thing but it tells you who the host is run by.
Four stars only because I’d like an iOS app the way Linode/DO have. Web panel is fine on mobile (responsive, big buttons), but a native app for restart/snapshot would be nice. Everything else: zero complaints, two VPSes since June 2024.
Ordered a Fortress in Bucharest, paid the $174.50 in XMR in one shot, expected to get an “please verify your account” email. Got the SSH credentials instead. This is what crypto-native was supposed to mean before every other host added compliance theatre.
Web app got hit with a low-RPS L7 flood with credible UA strings — the kind that bypasses naive rate-limiting. The Cryptoservers WAF (challenge mode) caught it within 90 seconds of my first 503 spike. I didn’t have to call anyone.
Locked myself out with a bad iptables flush. Logged into the IPMI portal in the panel, KVM console, fixed it, back in 8 minutes. You don’t need to email anyone to get serial console.
The invoice page shows the XMR address, exact piconero amount, and a QR. It also re-quotes the amount every 4 minutes if you don’t send right away, so I never had to deal with “amount mismatch” from a stale rate.
Asked for two extra IPv4 for some PVE container routing tests. Got both in 22 minutes, billing prorated for the rest of the cycle, no “upgrade to our pro support tier” nonsense.
August 2024 ISP sweep — two of my other hosts blackholed any prefix that touched a name on the list. Cryptoservers’ AMS POP didn’t flinch. Their abuse template explicitly says they don’t pre-emptively action customer prefixes on unsubstantiated lists. That’s the whole pitch in one sentence.
I keep their 0x9A4B…F2E1 in my keyring. The canary, every billing reminder, every important support response — all signed by the same key. This is the difference between “we believe in privacy” and “we operate it.”
Set up Vault dedi in Zurich, ZFS pool, NFSv4 with Kerberos, six editors VPN’d in. Zero packet loss on the trans-Atlantic editor’s session for the entire shoot. Production accountant paid the invoice in BTC because it was easier than getting the company card approved for a no-KYC host. Even the bookkeeper agrees.
Received a courtesy notice (German speech-policing org) about a comment thread on my forum. Reply was three lines: not actionable under our jurisdiction, here’s the public AUP, here’s the canary line item we’re logging it on. Done. The complainant didn’t pursue it.
Used Tron-USDT to settle an invoice because TRX fees are basically free. Confirmed in 13 seconds, server provisioned in 3 minutes 41 seconds total. Tried this with a different host last year and they made me wait for 20 block confirmations on TRON, which was theatrical given finality is instant.
I’ve paid invoices in TRX, POL, ATOM, and ZEC over the last 9 months. All four were just panel options. Bills automatically reconcile. The bookkeeper doesn’t have to do anything special.
Citadel tier, dual 9474F. I/O latency p99 has been a flat 0.18 ms on the NVMe pool since I deployed in June. With a virtualised neighbour-shared box this number bounces between 0.4 ms and 12 ms depending on the time of day. The price premium for dedicated is worth it for anything DB-shaped.
Status page tells me “Amsterdam POP: operational” but I’d love per-rack or per-pop component breakdown like StatusGator/Atlassian does. Otherwise zero issues over 5 months on a Growth in NL.
May 2024 — saw the launch thread on r/HomeServer, bought a Starter in Iceland on a whim. Still online, never restarted by them, never billed wrong. Easiest $51 I’ve spent in six months.
I run a polling-aggregation site that gets melted on Election Day. Migrated from a CDN’d serverless setup (that got rate-limited by my provider) to a Cryptoservers Bastion + Cloudflare combo six weeks before US election. Handled 14× the traffic of 2020 without breaking sweat.
Set up a BTC subaccount derived from my Ledger using a watch-only xpub on their invoice page. Every invoice generates a fresh address, no key reuse, no privacy leak. The integration is clean and the bookkeeping is honest about what’s on-chain vs off.
fio random-read 4k QD32 hits 418k IOPS on a Business VPS NVMe slice. Storage IO is, in my experience, where most VPS hosts cheat. Cryptoservers genuinely runs proper enterprise NVMe and doesn’t oversubscribe.
I’ve been kicked off (in order): GoDaddy, Bluehost, OVH, DigitalOcean and Vultr — all for entirely legal content that didn’t fit someone’s “narrative scope.” Cryptoservers didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Reading their Acceptable Use Policy is genuinely refreshing — it’s 4 paragraphs of “don’t actually hurt people, otherwise enjoy.”
Three stars because, even though Iceland is the best place to run exits, the Starter at $8.50/mo is still expensive for “just an exit”. I’d pay $3/mo for an exit-only profile with shared IP and no panel access — a la what Cock.li does. Otherwise the host is great.
We’re a small Latin American investigative outlet and we needed a host that didn’t require corporate verification (we don’t legally exist as a single entity). Cryptoservers asked for nothing. The Business tier in Bucharest handles our traffic without breaking a sweat.
I uploaded my public key to the panel and now their billing and support emails to me are encrypted with my pubkey by default. The whole pipeline is real — not “PGP-signed only,” actually encrypted.
October 2024 — my Pro VPS in Romania had two networking incidents within 4 days that took my workload offline for ~17 and 38 minutes respectively. Status page acknowledged both, support credited me, but I expected better from a host I picked specifically for uptime. November onwards has been spotless. Updating to 4 stars if December stays clean. Editing on 2025-01-04: stayed clean. Updated to 4 stars.
I literally pushed iperf3 at full line rate to a peer in DE-CIX for 6 hours one evening to validate the “unmetered” claim. Average throughput: 9.71 Gbps for the entire window. No shaping, no email, no surprise traffic-rule change.
Had a /24 from RIPE I wanted to advertise from their Amsterdam POP. Filled in the LOA form, sent it, BGP session up the next business day, prefixes accepted globally within an hour. Pricing was reasonable and clearly documented.
Filed a ticket about a flaky drive — they responded in 18 minutes, scheduled a maintenance window I picked, replaced the NVMe, transparently shared the SMART logs of the old one. I cannot remember the last time hosting support showed me an actual diagnostic.
I top up the panel credit balance in XMR every 2-3 months. Auto-renew has fired 7 times. Never a billing dispute, never an “account locked” email. Just servers, running, every day. That’s what I’m paying for.
We’re a small DAO that does Ethereum subgraph indexing for our protocol. Tried hosting on AWS but the legal entity question was awkward (the DAO has no traditional incorporation). Cryptoservers’ Fortress tier solved both the “who pays” problem (treasury multisig signs the XMR tx) and the “who owns” problem (nobody, the DAO does). Six months in, no friction.
I work in IP engineering and the level of detail on their /network/ page is unusual for a privacy host. Real PeeringDB IX/PNI counts, advertised /24 list, anycast POP fingerprints. This is what serious operators look like.
A SaaS migration, a Tor-exit family, a privacy NGO under state-grade pressure. Three customers who took the time to write more than a star rating — and let us repost it here.
We moved our entire production stack off DigitalOcean in 11 days. The thing that sold us wasn’t the price — it was the fact that I could verify every signed message back to a key I’d already imported.
Our previous host suspended our staging environment over a misclassified abuse report — a 3rd-party scanner saw our health-check endpoints and flagged them as “reconnaissance.” The reinstatement took 9 hours and a phone call with a compliance manager. We decided that day to move.
I shortlisted seven offshore providers and ran a two-week parallel-run on three of them (FlokiNET, BuyVM, Cryptoservers). Cryptoservers won on a combination of (a) the network behaved consistently under packet captures, (b) the support replies actually came signed with the canary key, and (c) the orchestrator API let me build an idempotent Terraform module without having to learn a vendor DSL.
Eleven days, four engineers, one weekend cut-over. Production hasn’t flinched.
I run a five-node Tor exit family. Most hosts say “we don’t allow Tor.” A few say “you can run a relay.” Cryptoservers said “set the reduced-exit policy, send us the relay fingerprint for our abuse contact list, you’re fine.”
Iceland is, by my count, the single best EU jurisdiction for Tor exit relays: clean ISP relationship, no automated DMCA pipeline, no automated EU-wide content-removal pressure. Cryptoservers’ Reykjavik POP felt purpose-built for this work.
I’ve received over forty abuse notices in eight months — every single one was handled by the host the same way: filed, anonymised, logged on the canary, never actioned against my VPS. When I responded with the Tor exit-relay legal template, the host’s abuse engineer reviewed and signed off without me having to escalate.
I now run all five exits here. The price is more than I’d like — but for Iceland-IS routing, it’s the cheapest serious option.
Our threat model includes a hostile member state. We needed Switzerland (Article 17 protections), no KYC (we sometimes onboard collaborators we cannot publicly name), and proper DDoS scrubbing (our adversaries occasionally make our threat model explicit). Cryptoservers ticks all three boxes more crisply than any other vendor I evaluated.
We host the secure-drop intake for an EU privacy NGO whose adversaries include at least one well-resourced state actor. Switzerland was a non-negotiable because the Swiss federal data-protection regime has the strongest precedent we know of for refusing cross-border discovery orders.
Cryptoservers’ Zurich POP gave us a Bastion tier — 32 cores, 128 GB ECC, 10 Gbps unmetered — for less than what we were paying for a noticeably less-private VPS at another Swiss host. The DDoS mitigation has been tested by adversarial traffic twice in the eighteen months we’ve been here: both times the legitimate user-flow stayed up while the booter traffic was scrubbed at the edge.
Operationally, the support team understands threat models. When we asked them to please not aggregate any of our outbound netflow into their abuse-correlation infrastructure, the answer was a written PGP-signed confirmation that they don’t run netflow capture in the first place. Hard to ask for more than that.
How we collect, why we publish the bad ones, how to leave your own — answered without hedging.