Still on 1984? Checking in before I renew for another year

Six client boxes and about thirty names sitting on 1984, and the annual comes up in August, so I would rather ask now than after I have paid.

I moved everything there in 2021 for the obvious reasons — Iceland, they take Monero, the entry box is four euros a month, and they only collect what they need to bill you. It has been quiet since. Quiet is what I am paying for. But quiet also means I have no idea whether the shop behind it is still the shop I signed up to.

So: anyone renewed this year? Anyone had a complaint forwarded to them? Anyone got an actual human on a ticket recently?

Depends what you're running, obviously. Mine is boring — client sites, brochureware, nothing that attracts letters. If you are running something that does attract letters, say so, because that is the answer I actually want.

Still here. Two box, both fine, one since 2021 and one since last summer.

Anyway support is slow but they do answer. Is small company, you feel it. Nobody wake up at night for you.

For renewal I would not think twice. Price is same as when I start.

Been on them since 2019 and the thing nobody says about 1984 is that the reason it feels quiet is that they are small. Small is a feature right up until the week it isn't.

In 2014 I had the lot on a Dutch reseller who answered tickets in forty minutes because there were about nine of us on the box and the owner read his own mail. Then he sold it. Same hardware, same IP range, completely different company, and the first complaint that landed after the handover terminated me with no notice at all. Iceland does not protect you from a change of ownership.

I renewed in May. Nothing has changed that I can see. Which is not the same sentence as nothing has changed.

Slow how? Hours or days? That is the only number that matters when a box is down.

Days. Twice was 36 hour. Never lost a box though.

FWIW the renewal question and the support question are the same question, and neither of them is the one that will bite you.

IME with a small host the failure is never a dramatic termination. It is a box that goes unreachable on a Saturday, a ticket that gets read on Monday, and you finding out on Tuesday that the hypervisor had a disk event on Friday. Nobody is lying to you in that sequence. There is just nobody on shift.

So the answer to "should I renew" is "renew, and stop needing them to be awake":

#!/bin/sh
# box-alive — cron this from a machine that is not the box
set -eu
if ! ssh -o BatchMode=yes -o ConnectTimeout=5 "$BOX" true 2>/dev/null; then
  logger -t box-alive "$BOX unreachable"
  printf 'down %s\n' "$(date -u +%FT%TZ)" >> /var/log/box-alive
fi

Four euros a month is cheap enough that the correct number of 1984 boxes is two, in different racks, and the correct expectation of the ticket queue is that it exists for billing.

Minimal is doing a lot of work in "they only collect what they need to bill you".

What they need to bill you is a billing email and a payment trail. That email is an identifier. If it is the same address you used for the registrar, the CDN and the ad account, then the data minimisation you are paying for was undone by you before you finished signing up.

Iceland is a good jurisdiction. It is not a mind-wipe. Ask what they hold, then ask what you handed them that they never asked for.

I have been on 1984 for a long time and I think the renewal question deserves a real answer rather than a vibe, so here is the whole of it. I have not tested the dedicated tier, only VPS and the registrar side, so weight it accordingly.

What "minimal KYC" actually means here

It means no ID upload and no name verification, and it does not mean no records. You have a billing address field, an email, and a payment history. Monero payment removes the payment leg. It does not remove the other two, and most people who describe themselves as anonymous on this host have a real email in the account because they wanted the invoice reminders to arrive somewhere they read.

The practical test is not "did they ask for a passport". It is "if somebody with a warrant asks this company for everything they hold on account 4417, what is in the file". Answer that honestly before you decide whether four euros bought you what you think it bought you.

Iceland is a jurisdiction, not a shield

Icelandic law is genuinely better than most of the alternatives on data retention and on how much weight a foreign complaint carries. That is real and it is why the host exists. But the mechanism people imagine — a complaint arrives, Iceland ignores it — is not what happens. What happens is that a routine complaint carries no legal force, so the host gets to choose. A small host with a stated free-expression posture usually chooses to do nothing. A small host that has been bought, or that is having a bad quarter with its upstream transit provider, chooses differently and you will not get advance notice of the change.

So the thing you are actually buying is a host whose incentives currently point the right way. Incentives change. Jurisdiction changes much more slowly, which is why it is still worth paying for, but do not confuse the two.

What I would do before renewing

1. Send them a support ticket about something trivial and time how long it takes. You are measuring the current staffing level, not their manners. If it comes back in under two days the shop is still staffed.
2. Check whether your billing email, your registrar contact and your abuse contact are three different addresses. If they are the same address you have one identity, not three, and no host can fix that for you.
3. Pull a full off-box backup before you renew, not after. The moment to discover your restore does not work is not the moment the host is unreachable.
4. Split. Six boxes on one provider in one country is a single point of failure wearing a privacy costume. Two of those six belong somewhere else, and you will notice the cost is trivial and the peace of mind is not.

On the price

Four euros is not a discount, it is a small unmanaged VPS at market rate from a company that does not spend money on marketing. Do not read cheap as unsustainable. Read it as unmanaged, and staff around it yourself.

Summary: renew, but renew two of them somewhere else at the same time and stop treating a single host as a plan.

eight hundred words to say pay for two years and keep a backup

That is a fair summary and considerably shorter than mine.

Four euros a month?! Moving everything over this week!

Don't. Or at least not everything, and not this week.

Depends what you're running. If it is a lander farm you can rebuild from a repo in an hour, sure, four euros is four euros. If it is client work with uptime expectations attached, an unmanaged four euro box from a small Icelandic shop is not the same product as the thing you are currently paying more for, and you will find that out at the worst possible moment rather than the cheapest one.

The reason I am still here after two years is that I moved three boxes first and left the rest where they were for six months.

everything onto one four euro box in iceland. come back and tell us how that went

Small update since this is turning into a check-in thread and those are the only threads on this board worth anything six months later.

Opened a ticket on the 28th about a reverse DNS entry, which is the most boring possible request. Answer came back inside a day, and it was a person, not a macro. So whatever staffing worry I had in my first post, it is not showing up in June.

Still running the same four sites I was running in 2019 on the same box. In 2014 that would have been a bragging point. Now it just means I have not been paying attention.

Has anyone in this thread actually had a complaint land on a 1984 box, or are we all reporting that nothing happened to sites nobody complains about?