A year on ExtraVM — post what happened when a complaint actually landed

Eleven months on ExtraVM across three boxes and I am about to move a fourth thing there, so I want to sanity check it against people who have run them longer.

The pitch is straightforward and, as far as I can tell, true. They take fifty-odd coins, they explicitly do not ask for ID or passport or address when you pay in crypto, entry is three and a half dollars, and there are boxes in the US, the Netherlands and Singapore. Provisioning is instant, the panel is normal, the network has been fine.

What I do not have is a single data point on the part that matters. IME every host is excellent until the first complaint arrives, and then you find out what you actually bought. So the question is narrow: has a complaint landed on your ExtraVM box, and what did they do with it? Not "is it good value". It is obviously good value. What happens when it breaks.

Been on them since August, zero issues, honestly a steal at that price!

Two boxes, both Netherlands, paid in USDT both times and nobody asked me a single thing. Provisioned in like four minutes. I moved off a mainstream host that wanted a card and I am never going back!

Zero issues meaning zero complaints, or zero complaints that reached you?

...fair. Zero that reached me.

I run two there since 2023. One in Netherlands, one in Singapore.

Nothing happen to me but I keep boring things there. Anyway important part, they are normal company that takes crypto, not bulletproof host. Is different thing and people mix it because both say no KYC.

For price is very good. For content that gets letter, no.

vlad has it and it is worth saying harder, because the marketing invites the confusion.

No KYC at signup is a statement about what they collect. It is not a statement about what they do when someone complains, and it is not a statement about what they keep. Those are three separate properties and this host only advertises the first one.

Also: US, Netherlands, Singapore. If you picked the US region because it was closest to your traffic, you bought a no-ID signup in the single most complaint-responsive jurisdiction on the list. Your threat model is not "will they see my passport". It is "whose court order lands on this rack".

I have ExtraVM under a few things and I would recommend it with the boundary drawn clearly, because it is genuinely the best value in its category and the category is not the one half this thread thinks it is.

What it is: a competent commercial VPS shop that took the deliberate decision to accept about fifty coins and to waive ID checks for crypto customers. Three fifty a month entry, instant provisioning, three regions, a panel that works, and support that answers like a normal company rather than like a bulletproof shop that resents you. For anything you would put on a mainstream host but do not want tied to a card, that combination is hard to beat and I have not found better at the price.

What it is not: DMCA-ignored. There is no such policy and they do not claim one. A complaint arrives, it gets forwarded to you with a clock on it, and if you ignore it you will find out that the no-ID signup did not buy you immunity from anything. Depends what you're running — if the answer is "things that generate complaints", pay the bulletproof premium elsewhere and stop trying to get it for three fifty.

Boring work, crypto payment, no card in the billing file: yes. Letters: no.

it's a cheap vps that takes coins. it was never the other thing

Since this thread is going to be the one people find, I want to lay out the distinction properly, because "no KYC hosting" covers three unrelated products and buying the wrong one is the most common expensive mistake on this board. I run boxes in all three categories, so this is from use rather than from reading about-pages.

The three things people mean by no-KYC hosting

Payment anonymity. The provider does not want your identity in order to bill you. Crypto in, server out, no card and no name. ExtraVM is squarely this. So is most of the cheap end of the market now — it turns out accepting coins is a marketing feature that costs the provider almost nothing.

Data minimisation. The provider structurally cannot hand over much because they never collected it and do not keep it. This is a smaller set and it is a claim you cannot verify, only infer from how the signup is built. A host with no account at all is honest about this by construction. A host with a normal billing panel and an email field is making a promise.

Takedown resistance. The provider receives complaints and declines to act on them. This is the expensive one, it is a legal and commercial posture rather than a technical one, and it correlates with price for a reason: the provider is buying transit from someone who can also be leaned on, and absorbing that pressure costs money.

The three are independent. You can have the first without either of the others, which is exactly what three dollars fifty buys you, and the reason this comes up every month is that all three get marketed with the same two words.

Where ExtraVM actually sits

First category, cleanly, and it is very good at it. The waiver is explicit on their own crypto page rather than being folklore from a forum post, which is more than can be said for half the hosts recommended here. Multiple regions, real capacity, normal support.

The second category it is silent on, which I read as honest rather than sinister. They have a billing system, that billing system has your email and your payment history, and nothing about accepting Monero changes that.

The third category it does not claim and you should not assume. I have not had a complaint land on one of mine, so I cannot tell you what they do. I can tell you that a provider with US racks and a conventional corporate structure has a predictable answer available to it and no incentive to choose the other one.

What I would actually do with three regions

Do not put the origin and the failover in the same provider's estate, however many countries they have. Two providers, two payment identities. The country diversity ExtraVM offers is real for latency and close to worthless for resilience, because the thing that removes your box is an account action, not a geographic one, and the account is the same account in all three regions.

Summary: buy it for the price and the payment posture, both of which are excellent. Do not buy it expecting the third thing, and do not let a good cheap host become your only host.

Bookmarked. Will not read.

The part of this I would underline is that cheap hosting getting a crypto checkout is a fairly recent thing and it changed what the word offshore means.

In 2014 if you wanted to pay for a server without a card you were dealing with someone on ICQ and a Liberty Reserve balance, and the price of that was terrible hardware and a host who vanished twice a year. Now a perfectly normal shop takes fifty coins and gives you a proper panel for the price of a coffee. That is progress and I do not want to be cynical about it.

What has not changed is that the moment your host is normal, its incentives are normal, and normal companies forward complaints. We traded a category of risk for a category of convenience and mostly that was the right trade, but people talk as if we got both.

Sorry to jump into a thread that is clearly for people who know what they are doing, and sorry if this is the wrong section for it.

I have been reading this all evening because I need my first proper VPS. Right now everything I have is on shared hosting under my own name with a card, which after reading this thread I understand is not great. What I am running is two affiliate landers and a small tracker, so nothing that anyone would ever complain about, and about forty dollars a month of traffic through it.

My question is just which region. The traffic is mostly European. Netherlands sounds obvious but nullroute's post about jurisdiction made me think I am missing something. Thanks in advance to everyone, this thread has already taught me a lot.

Singapore is fine. Netherlands is better for you.

Thank you, ordering the Netherlands one tonight.

Two months of running the fourth box and one operational note that is worth more than the jurisdiction argument for most people here.

Instant provisioning means instant deprovisioning. There is no ceremony on the way out either. So the thing to build on day one is the rebuild, not the backup — a box you can recreate from a repo in twenty minutes is a box you do not have to negotiate for.

# rebuild.sh — everything the box is, in one file
set -eu
apt-get -qq update
apt-get -qq install -y nginx ufw borgbackup
ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22,80,443/tcp
ufw --force enable
install -m 0644 ./conf/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
systemctl enable --now nginx

FWIW this is the entire difference between a host being an inconvenience and a host being a disaster, and it is independent of which host you picked.