DigitalOcean is good product engineering on top of an identity-bound billing model. NordBastion is the same shape of VPS — but without the credit card, without the KYC, and pinned to one of four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions.
Same shape of product (KVM-virtualised VPS, snapshots, DNS, root SSH, hourly-grade automation) without the identity-bound billing model.
Lower price at equivalent specs — a Sentinel at $5.90/mo ships 2 vCPU and 4 GB versus a $7/mo basic droplet at 1 vCPU and 1 GB.
Constitutional choice of jurisdiction — Sweden, Finland, Norway or Iceland — with a published warrant canary and transparency report.
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| KYC | None — email + password only | Implicit via card issuer; selfie/ID may be requested |
| Billing | Crypto prepaid — BTC, XMR, ETH, LTC, USDT, USDC + more | Credit card / PayPal; no on-chain crypto rail |
| Entry VPS | $5.90 / mo · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 120 GB NVMe | $7 / mo · 1 vCPU · 1 GB · 25 GB SSD (basic AMD) |
| Mid VPS (8 vCPU / 16 GB) | $23.90 / mo · Ravelin · 480 GB NVMe | ~$96 / mo · general purpose |
| vCPU policy | Pinned, reserved | Basic = burstable; Premium = dedicated thread |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered, 1–10 Gbps uplink by tier | 500 GB – 10 TB / mo metered, overage billed |
| Regions | 4 Nordic bastions · STO, HEL, OSL, RKV | 15 global regions |
| Dedicated bare-metal | $99 – $1,099 / mo · 5 tiers, 30 min deploy | Not offered — dedicated CPU droplets only |
| DDoS mitigation | Always-on, included | Basic, opt-in app-level via Cloud Firewall |
| Warrant canary | Yes — monthly, PGP-signed | No |
| Transparency report | Published, rolling 12 months | Annual, US legal context |
| Managed services | No — infrastructure only by doctrine | Managed Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Spaces, App Platform |
DigitalOcean prices and policies reflect publicly listed values in early 2026 and may have changed since.
No card, no ID, no recurring auto-charge. Same shape of droplet, less than half the per-spec price at the entry and mid tiers. If your single criterion is "I want the cheapest serious VPS that does not know who I am", the migration is straightforward.
Managed Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Spaces object storage, App Platform PaaS, marketplace one-clicks. NordBastion is deliberately infrastructure-only; we will not ship a managed PostgreSQL because the access logs alone would compromise the privacy floor. If you need PaaS, stay or split.
15 regions across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. NordBastion runs four Nordic bastions on purpose — jurisdictional focus is the whole point of the product. If your latency target is Singapore or São Paulo, NordBastion is wrong for you today.
Take a DigitalOcean snapshot of the source droplet — panel or doctl. Download the raw image to your laptop or to a temporary S3-compatible bucket.
Create the NordBastion account (email + password), top up a prepaid balance in Bitcoin or Monero, no card required.
Pick the Nordic bastion of your choice, order the equivalent NordBastion tier (the spec table above maps droplet sizes directly) and select "Custom image" with the snapshot URL.
Lower the TTL on the affected A/AAAA records 24 h before the move. At cut-over, swap the A record to the NordBastion IPv4 — propagation typically completes in minutes.
Destroy the source droplet on DigitalOcean once you have confirmed the NordBastion server is serving production traffic. The remaining DigitalOcean balance is yours.
For most teams the right play is not "leave DigitalOcean entirely". It is to recognise that a droplet is a fungible resource — there is no good privacy reason to keep it on a US identity-bound platform when the same shape of compute is available KYC-free at a lower per-spec price under constitutional Nordic protection.
Move the compute. If you depend on Managed Postgres, Spaces or App Platform, keep those on DigitalOcean for now — there is no managed-services equivalent on NordBastion, by doctrine. As your stack moves from “PaaS-everywhere” to “infrastructure-I-own”, the bridge shortens; some teams complete the move in a quarter, others run a hybrid indefinitely.
NordBastion will not be everything DigitalOcean is. It will be a faster, cheaper, KYC-free droplet pinned in one of four Nordic legal regimes with a published canary, and that is exactly the part you came here for.
The questions teams actually ask before moving a workload away from DigitalOcean.
DigitalOcean is excellent product engineering on top of an identity-bound billing model. You pay with a credit card whose issuer has done KYC on you, and the platform retains the right to require additional verification at any time, including a photo of a government ID. For workloads where that linkage is a problem — personal infrastructure under a real name, a small business that does not want a US Tier-1 host in its data path, anything that touches privacy-sensitive customer data — it is the wrong default. NordBastion exists for exactly that shortlist of cases.
At equivalent specs, yes. The Sentinel ($5.90/mo) gives you 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 120 GB NVMe; the closest DigitalOcean droplet is the basic Premium AMD at $7/mo for 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM and 25 GB SSD. The advantage widens at every tier: a NordBastion Ravelin ($23.90/mo) ships 8 vCPU, 16 GB and 480 GB NVMe with unmetered bandwidth, against a DigitalOcean droplet at $48/mo for 4 vCPU and 8 GB on a metered 5 TB.
Yes. NordBastion bills exclusively in cryptocurrency — Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, Litecoin, USDT, USDC and others. You top up a prepaid balance, the cost of running servers is drawn from it. No card on file, no recurring auto-charge, no PSP that has done KYC on you.
Three steps. First, snapshot the droplet on DigitalOcean and download it as a raw disk image. Second, order an equivalent NordBastion VPS in the bastion of your choice — Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo or Reykjavík — and request a custom-image install (panel or POST /v1/servers with bootstrap=url). Third, attach DNS via the new IP and decommission the source. Total wall-clock for a small droplet: about 25 minutes.
Better at the entry tier. NordBastion ships pinned vCPU cores (not bursty fractional slices), reserved memory (no overcommit), and local NVMe (not network-attached block). On a Geekbench 6 single-core benchmark a Sentinel sits around 1,850, vs ~1,600 for a comparable DigitalOcean basic droplet. The gap narrows at higher tiers — dedicated DigitalOcean CPU-optimised droplets are excellent — but at the price point most developers care about, NordBastion is faster per dollar.
No. NordBastion is deliberately infrastructure-only: VPS and dedicated servers, with snapshots, networking, DNS and the panel. There is no managed Postgres, no S3-compatible object store, no PaaS. If your workload depends on those services, run them yourself on top of NordBastion or split: keep managed databases on DigitalOcean and move only the compute. The doctrine on this is published.
NordBastion publishes a 99.99% per-bastion SLA with monthly uptime broken out on /status/. DigitalOcean publishes a 99.99% droplet SLA. The two are equivalent on paper; in practice both maintain it. The deciding factor for most teams is not the SLA percentage — it is whether outages are honestly communicated. NordBastion publishes a public status page; DigitalOcean also does. Compare the actual recent history when it matters.
Terraform and Ansible: yes — NordBastion exposes a REST API v1 with first-class server / snapshot / SSH-key / network resources, plus a Terraform provider in development and official SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust. The CLI is `nb` instead of `doctl` and reads NB_API_KEY from the environment. If you script DigitalOcean today, you will script NordBastion the same way tomorrow.
Same editorial rules — facts only, dated, no disparagement. Each page is the honest migration story for that source host.
The hyperscaler default.
Amazon Web Services, 33 regions, identity-bound billing, t4g.nano from $3.06/mo.
The veteran independent, acquired.
Founded 2003, acquired by Akamai 2022; 11 regions, $5/mo entry, card-only.
Bare-metal + global VPS.
32 regions, hourly billing, crypto accepted but full KYC on signup.
The European low-cost giant.
Germany / Finland / US, EU corporate KYC, dedicated from €39, CX22 VPS from €3.79.
The French dedicated-server giant.
Roubaix-headquartered, identity required by AML/CRBF, VPS from €3.50.
