Pre-installed FreeBSD 13.3 and 14.0 on every tier, with OpenZFS 2.2 in base, jails, bhyve and the full ports collection. Stock GENERIC kernel, no NordBastion patches, no telemetry — close to a fresh bsdinstall(8) of freebsd.org sources.
Pre-installed FreeBSD 13.3 and 14.0 on every tier — Sentinel to Citadel, no surcharge, plus ZFS-root and jails-ready variants.
OpenZFS 2.2 in base, jails as a first-class primitive, bhyve for nested VMs, full ports tree — stock kernel with no NordBastion patches.
Pinned to one of four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions — Sweden, Finland, Norway or Iceland — paid in Bitcoin or Monero.
OpenZFS is in the FreeBSD base system, not a third-party module bolted on later. zpool, zfs, bectl, boot environments — all part of the OS the project tests against. For storage-heavy workloads (an off-site backup target, a static-asset cache, a database that wants its own checksum layer) this matters in a way that the Linux-side OpenZFS port does not quite match.
Jails predate cgroups + namespaces by a decade and arrive without a daemon, without a separate runtime to update, and with much stricter isolation defaults than Docker. They do not run unmodified Linux containers, but for FreeBSD-native services that should be partitioned (an nginx, a Postgres, a borgserver) they are the lightest correct primitive.
FreeBSD is BSD-licensed — no GPL viral clauses, no licence-compatibility audits when you embed parts of the base. The ports collection is a 30-year archive of third-party software with a strong tradition of maintainership; pkg gives you the same packages as binary in seconds. The combination is uniquely productive for an operator who wants to compose their own stack.
| Image | Slug | Use case |
|---|---|---|
| FreeBSD 14.0 (RELEASE) | freebsd-14.0 |
Current release — the default pick for a new FreeBSD server in 2026, with first-class OpenZFS 2.2 and the modern bhyve. |
| FreeBSD 13.3 (RELEASE) | freebsd-13.3 |
Previous release, supported until April 2026 EoL — for runbooks and ports that have not yet been re-validated against 14.0. |
| FreeBSD 14.0 + ZFS-root | freebsd-14.0-zfs |
Installed on a ZFS root pool from first boot — snapshots, boot environments and bectl(8) work out of the box, no UFS migration needed later. |
| FreeBSD 14.0 + jails-ready | freebsd-14.0-jails |
Base jail tooling (jail(8), iocage and bastille) pre-installed, vnet enabled in kernel, ready to host half a dozen jailed services on a single VPS. |
Custom ISO mount available for FreeBSD -CURRENT, -STABLE snapshots or any supported release on request — ticket-free via the panel.
First-class ZFS, jails as the lightweight container primitive, bhyve for nested VMs, the ports tree for everything else. The right pick for storage-heavy workloads and operators who compose their own stack from base.
Containers, Kubernetes, vendor binaries, the modern observability stack — all of it assumes Linux. Pick /debian-vps/, /ubuntu-vps/ or /arch-linux-vps/.
The minimal-audited BSD — W^X, KARL, pledge/unveil baked into the base. Smaller package set, deliberate release model. See /openbsd-vps/ for the public-internet daemon host.
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 120 GB NVMe. A ZFS-root FreeBSD here runs a borgserver target, a small jail of nginx + acme.sh, or a Tarsnap-style remote backup endpoint with snapshot retention measured in years.
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 240 GB NVMe. The sweet spot for a jails-host running three to five partitioned services, a Postgres on ZFS with compression, or a bhyve dev VM alongside the main workload.
8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 480 GB NVMe. Comfortable for a dozen jailed services on a single host, a large ZFS dataset with frequent snapshot send/recv, or a bhyve-based lab running two or three guest VMs.
Full tier line — Sentinel · Garrison · Ravelin · Bulwark · Citadel — on /vps/.
For storage-heavy workloads, jail-partitioned service stacks, or operators who want a coherent base system to compose from, FreeBSD on NordBastion gives you OpenZFS in base, jails as a first-class primitive, bhyve nested virtualisation and the ports collection. The pairing with a Nordic KYC-free host is consistent: two systems with permissive licences and explicit written commitments to refuse identity collection.
Pick a Linux distribution when your workload is fundamentally OCI containers. Pick OpenBSD when you need a minimal audited daemon host. Pick FreeBSD when you want ZFS, jails and a unified base.
The questions operators actually ask before deploying a ZFS-first jails-first BSD on a privacy-first host.
FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE as the current default, 13.3-RELEASE for the remaining supported window of the 13 branch, plus the ZFS-root and jails-ready variants of 14. -CURRENT and -STABLE snapshots are not in the panel by default but can be installed on request via the ISO-mount workflow for development hosts.
Yes. OpenZFS 2.2 ships in the base system, the ZFS-root image installs onto a zroot pool with boot environments managed by bectl(8), and the panel takes its snapshots at the hypervisor layer — they compose with your in-VM ZFS snapshots rather than fighting them. You can zfs send / zfs recv to a remote pool over SSH without extra packages.
Jails are the original container technology — older than Linux cgroups and namespaces by a decade — and they are part of the base system, not a separate runtime. They are lighter than Docker (no daemon, no per-jail TCP stack unless you opt in to vnet), more strictly isolated by default, but they do not run unmodified Linux container images. If your workload is OCI-shaped, use Linux; if it is FreeBSD-native services that should be partitioned, jails are the correct primitive.
Yes — nested virtualisation is enabled on every tier from Garrison upwards, so bhyve can run guest VMs inside your FreeBSD VPS. This is mainly useful for development (a small Linux guest for a runtime that does not exist as a port, a Windows guest for compatibility testing). Performance overhead is the usual nested-VM tax, around 5-10% on CPU-bound workloads.
Yes. pkg defaults to pkg.FreeBSD.org via the official mirror network, which resolves to a European mirror (typically pkg-mirror.eu.freebsd.org) from the four Nordic bastions. The ports tree is fetched with git from src.FreeBSD.org as standard. The NordBastion firewall does not block any FreeBSD project endpoint.
Yes, freebsd-update is the canonical patch-and-minor-release tool on NordBastion images and works without modification. The image enables the standard cron entries for freebsd-update cron (security audits) but does not auto-apply patches — that is your decision, made explicit in a maintenance window.
They are both first-class operating systems on NordBastion, with different doctrines. FreeBSD is the "rich BSD" — large ports tree, ZFS, jails, bhyve, permissive licence, more familiar to operators coming from Linux. OpenBSD (see /openbsd-vps/) is the "minimal-audited BSD" — security-first defaults, smaller base, deliberate release cadence. Many operators run both, with FreeBSD as a storage / jails host and OpenBSD as an edge daemon host.
No — stock GENERIC FreeBSD kernel. We do not patch, we do not pre-tune sysctls beyond the upstream loader.conf defaults, and we do not ship a custom virtio driver. Every binary on disk traces back to a FreeBSD project release artefact.
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