In a world that is becoming more interconnected with more and more powerful governments and corporations moving through it by the day, anonymous internet services are becoming increasingly more and more critical. Here’s some information about these types of services, including why they are important and how they can be used.

Internet Hosting Anonymity Services Tips: Overview and Bitcoin

Anonymity should be one of the most important things you focus on when you go to look at potential web host options. After all, this is going to be one of the areas where you could have your identity revealed or have sensitive information get out if this is something that you’re worried about currently.

This means that you have to focus on a few particular options within this area in order to from the basis of your decision. For example, one question that it’s worth asking early is whether or not a hosting company takes Bitcoin or not.

This is important for a number of reasons. It’s important for the obvious reason, which is that this would allow you to pay for your hosting with Bitcoin, which is a more anonymous way to pay for everything than the other common means of payment which often include PayPal and credit cards right at the top of the list.

These aren’t especially anonymous because they both tend to require that you hand out full details about yourself such as address and name. In the case of PayPal, there’s even a push to connect it with a bank account in order to get full functionality.  When it comes to credit cards, many of them even ask for a whole lot of information such as your social security system in the United States, for example.

But, with Bitcoin, once you fund your wallet, you can divorce the payment from yourself a bit. There are strategies to swap around coins too in order to make it even more anonymous. You can pay with cash at certain terminals that accept conversion from cash to Bitcoin directly.

Internet Hosting Tips: Other Markers to Look For

Besides Bitcoin or other anonymous options, there are other services within the hosting service that can be important in your determination about whether a company is going to be worth it to you if anonymity is your primary concern. For example, the country that a company is located in can make a major difference in terms of how safe you feel getting hosting services from them.

One example of this is OrangeWebsite, which has operations in Iceland. This country is often lauded for their privacy laws so this could be a good choice if you check out Iceland yourself and come to the same conclusion. Other people might simply try to avoid hosting services in countries they don’t trust due to poor privacy laws. There are also other nations out there that might be good for this such as Canada, which has user privacy protections, or Switzerland, which is often known for being neutral and not accepting demands for information from other countries that easily.

VPN Services

Another important privacy service worth mentioning is a Virtual Private Network. This is something that connects your computer’s Internet to a third party before it connects to a website. As a result, you’re able to make it seem like a different IP address, that is, a different computer other than yours connects to wherever online.

This extends to all of your connections, including anything you download or upload with other programs, for example. It can protect the security and privacy of a Skype video call, Facebook Facetime, or anything else that you want to keep protected. These services often use much higher level encryption than they would have otherwise, even the AES 256-bit encryption that’s known as being so secure plenty of corporations used it. This is actually important with services like Skype because they don’t really offer encryption on their own much of the time. The person you’re talking to will also not automatically get your IP address so you can keep it private.

Many people online speak of the importance of making sure that you pay for a VPN, because if you try to use a free one, there’s always the chance that the VPN is selling your information because, the idea is, if they don’t sell a product, then the product could be you and your data.

If you have some reason especially to make sure you can’t be traced, such as dealing with a government that has reason to snoop on you, then it’s important to try to have the whole package deal when it comes to your security and anonymity. That’s exactly why it’s helpful to pair a privacy and security conscious hosting service with a VPN for added security when you’re running a website and are trying to make sure that you can say what you want without being snooped on by governments, third party organizations, hackers, or anyone else that has no business looking into yours.

Proxy Services

One alternative to a VPN if you don’t need or don’t want to secure every connect, is to instead use another type of Internet privacy service called a proxy. These will mostly just secure your web browsing itself directly.

It can be a secondary option that will work well for you if you find one in a country you trust with a company you trust so that you can do what you have to do online anonymously, including running your website through a reputable company, for example.

For more information on privacy services including secure hosting and others, please contact us today.