BingLoft calls it offshore dedicated — offshore from what exactly?

BingLoft sells something called an offshore dedicated server. Offshore from what, exactly.

The company is in India. The capacity is partly theirs and partly resold, including a German footprint. There is no reachable statement anywhere on the public site about how they handle a complaint. So the word is doing no work at all except to attract people who read it as a synonym for something else entirely.

I am not accusing anyone of fraud. I am asking whether anybody here has actually run one, and what happened, because a shop that markets to this crowd without publishing a takedown posture is a shop whose posture you will discover at the worst possible moment.

I have had one under a low-stakes project for about eight months, so I can at least answer the factual half.

It is a normal commercial host, founded around 2015, India-based, and the VPS line starts somewhere in the high forties a month which is not cheap for what you get. Provisioning was ordinary, panel was ordinary, network was fine. Payment is cards, PayPal, wire and Bitcoin, which as ever tells you who the customer base actually is.

On the word: I read offshore in their material as meaning "not in the country you are in", which is how the mainstream hosting market has used it for twenty years and is not the same use as this board's. The bulletproof crowd borrowed the word later and gave it a meaning the original users never intended. Depends what you're running, but nothing about their pages promised me a takedown policy and I did not buy one.

offshore means the datacentre is not in your country. that is all it has ever meant

Then every host on earth is offshore to somebody. Useless word.

Had one there last year and it was totally fine!

Nothing ever happened to it though, so I guess that is exactly the useless kind of answer this thread is complaining about. It was up, it was fast enough, support replied in a day. That is all I actually know!

The resold capacity is the part I would look at rather than the marketing, because it changes who your abuse desk actually is.

If your box sits in a German rack that the shop buys from someone else, then a complaint arrives at the rack owner, gets forwarded to your provider, and your provider has a commercial relationship to protect that is worth more than your forty-seven dollars. That is a two-hop chain and you are at the far end of it with no visibility into either hop.

# find out whose network you are actually on
whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v $BOX_IP"
mtr -rwzc 20 "$BOX_IP" | tail -n 8

IME if the origin AS is not the provider's own, treat every policy statement they make as a statement about their intentions rather than their capabilities.

Going to disagree with the shrug in this thread. "It is a normal commercial host and it never promised you anything" is technically true and practically a bit generous.

They put the word offshore on a product page in a market where they know perfectly well what that word has come to mean to a chunk of the people searching for it. That is not fraud, it is the oldest trick in the business, and in 2014 we would have called it what it is rather than explaining that the term has an older sense. The older sense is real. It is also not why that word is on that page.

Being clear: I have nothing against the host. I have something against the shrug.

Fair, and I will take the correction on tone. Fine for a lander farm you can rebuild in an hour. Not fine for anything you cannot.