VPS hosting from Iceland and Switzerland

The hosting layer comes in five tiers of virtual private server, from a one-vCPU machine for a static archive site to a sixteen-vCPU machine that approaches the capacity of a small dedicated host. Every tier is a KVM virtual machine on AMD EPYC silicon with ECC memory and NVMe storage; the differences between them are quantitative, not qualitative.

We do not surface a recommendation. The reader knows their own workload better than a hosting brand can guess: a journalist running a single Ghost instance and a leak archive serving a few thousand readers a day need very different machines, and the honest thing to do is to print the specifications and let the reader choose. The four lower tiers are the most common; the top tier exists for projects that have outgrown the others and prefer a predictable invoice to a fresh procurement cycle.

Each plan in the ledger below carries its own dossier with the long-form framing — who that plan suits, where it can be deployed, and what the operator sees and does not see. The dossiers cite specific case-law and treaty positions where they earn their place, and they assume the reader has done the threshold reading on whether offshore hosting is the right posture for their work — the journal entry Why offshore hosting matters for journalism is the canonical reference.

The offering

VPS-1 $8/mo: 1 vCPU (AMD EPYC), 2 GB DDR4 ECC, 25 GB NVMe SSD, 1 TB / month bandwidth
VPS-2 $16/mo: 2 vCPU (AMD EPYC), 4 GB DDR4 ECC, 60 GB NVMe SSD, 3 TB / month bandwidth
VPS-4 $32/mo: 4 vCPU (AMD EPYC), 8 GB DDR4 ECC, 120 GB NVMe SSD, 6 TB / month bandwidth
VPS-8 $64/mo: 8 vCPU (AMD EPYC), 16 GB DDR4 ECC, 240 GB NVMe SSD, 10 TB / month bandwidth
VPS-16 $128/mo: 16 vCPU (AMD EPYC), 32 GB DDR4 ECC, 480 GB NVMe SSD, 20 TB / month bandwidth

Who this offering serves

The VPS tier list serves projects where the working layer is software the customer controls and the hardware boundary is the hypervisor — journalists running their own publication stack, dissident archivists curating an indexed corpus, NGO IT leads consolidating a small fleet of services on a single machine, federated-platform operators running Mastodon or Matrix for a small contributor base. The lower tiers cover first deployments and small-team workloads; the upper tiers cover the case where the project has outgrown a small machine but does not yet need bare metal.

Projects that prefer a managed platform — a shared control panel, a click-to-install application catalogue, an opinionated wrapper over the underlying VPS — should look elsewhere. OffshorePress ships KVM hypervisors and root access; the operator's job is to keep the layer below the customer running, not to opinionate about the layer above. For projects that need bare metal because shared hardware is part of the threat model, the dedicated tier list is the honest answer.

Where the VPS tier list operates

Every VPS is operated from Iceland or Switzerland. Iceland's hosting jurisprudence rests on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative and Resolution 23/138 of the Althingi; Switzerland's rests on the revised Federal Act on Data Protection in force since September 2023, the Federal Constitution Article 13, and the line of mail-server jurisprudence whose anchor is ProtonMail v UVEK A-550/2019. Both jurisdictions sit outside the Five-Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement; both refuse routine cooperation with foreign press-suppression orders.

The choice is made at the order step and is changeable by reprovisioning if the working assumption later turns out to be wrong. The full comparative framing sits in the journal at Iceland versus Switzerland for civil-liberties hosting; the per-jurisdiction dossiers carry the legal-instrument citations and the surveillance-treaty status that frame the choice in operational terms.

Each plan has its own page beneath this one with the full specification, the jurisdictions it can be deployed in, and the operator's contact email. There is no shopping cart on the way; the order step is a deliberate one.