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

Nothing landed on mine. Boring sites.

Ravenstack has the only real question in the thread and it has gone unanswered for three weeks, which is itself the answer.

IME nobody who has had a complaint land somewhere posts about it while it is live. They post about it after they have moved, and by then they are writing about the new host. So a check-in thread on a privacy host self-selects for people nothing has happened to. Worth remembering when you read the reassurance.

Merged a second thread asking the same question into this one. Two posts moved across, nothing removed.

Renewed. Paid two years on four of the six on the theory that if the shop changes hands I would rather be a paid-up customer than a monthly one, though I accept that theory is worth roughly nothing in practice.

The other two I moved, on hexforge's point about a single point of failure in a privacy costume. Same money, different country, different contact address, funded separately. Took an afternoon.

Invoice process was unchanged from 2021. Monero still accepted, no new fields, nobody asked me anything. So as of this month: yes, it still works, and it works the same way it did two years ago, which on this board is a rare thing to be able to write.

Different country and different contact is the part that mattered. The two years was theatre and you know it.

A paid-up invoice is not a claim on anything if the entity changes hands or decides you are trouble. What it buys you is that nobody sends a reminder for a while. Useful. Not protection.

Going to push back on the jurisdiction thing, because it has been said three times in here now as though it settles something.

Jurisdiction is the last variable that matters, not the first. I have watched sites survive on a host in a hostile country because the operator could not be bothered to read his abuse mailbox, and I have watched sites die on a host in a friendly one because the guy running it got a scary letter and folded inside a day. The law is what happens after somebody with a budget decides you are worth a court. Almost nobody in this thread is worth a court. What actually happens to us is a form letter and a small business owner deciding whether we are more trouble than four euros.

That is an operator question. Iceland is a sticker on the box.

Operator behaviour is what happens to you this year. Jurisdiction is what happens to your data for the next ten.

Those are separate risks and you are collapsing them because only one of them has ever bitten you. The friendly operator who folds costs you a box. The unfriendly jurisdiction costs you the logs, the payment trail and every address that ever touched the account, handed over years after you stopped being a customer and long after you stopped thinking about it.

Pick for both. It is not expensive to.

And I still say you are optimising for the adversary you find interesting rather than the one that actually turns up. Nobody is warehousing a decade of billing records against a man with forty landers.

I am not going to be talked out of this one. Pick for the operator, take the good jurisdiction if it is free, and it usually is, which is probably why we keep agreeing on the answer while disagreeing about why.

both of you are arguing about a four euro box

Still up here! Two months in, no problems at all!

Still up. Same two box, nothing to report, is good.

One thing since nobody say it yet. I move my billing mail to separate address in September like was suggested here. Took ten minutes, no problem in panel, they not ask why.

Four months of this thread and the only concrete failure anyone has reported is a 36 hour ticket. I will take that.

One thing to add for anyone reading this in a year, because it is the bit people skip. An off-box backup is not a snapshot held by the same provider. If the account goes, the snapshot goes with it, and the snapshot was the whole plan.

# nightly copy to somewhere that is not this provider
0 3 * * * borg create --compression zstd \
  "$REPO::{hostname}-{now:%Y%m%d}" /srv /etc
0 4 * * * borg prune --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 8 "$REPO"
0 5 * * 0 borg check --repository-only "$REPO"

The check line on Sunday is the one everybody leaves out and it is the only line that tells you the backup is real.

Have you ever restored from it, or only checked it?

Six months on, closing the loop for anyone who finds this in a search.

Nothing broke. Renewals went through, prices did not move, the Monero option is still there, nobody asked me for anything new. One ticket answered in a day, one in about two. Two boxes moved off for redundancy rather than because of a problem.

The honest caveat is the one PipelineRat made in July: this thread is people reporting that nothing happened to sites nobody complains about. If you are running something that draws letters, 1984 is not the host that question is about and you should be reading the bulletproof threads instead. For boring work at four euros with a legal posture that does not embarrass you, it still works.

Not marking this solved because it is a check-in thread and the answer expires.

Six months to establish that the four euro box is still four euros.