VPS Virtual Private Server
A virtualised slice of a real machine, with root SSH, your own kernel and a price tag in single-digit euros.
A Virtual Private Server: an isolated, virtualised slice of a physical host machine — typically backed by the KVM hypervisor on Linux — with its own kernel, root password and IP address. Customers get full administrative control inside their slice while sharing the underlying CPU, RAM, storage and network with other tenants on the same host.
The VPS is our default unit of compute.
Everything we sell is, at the bottom of the stack, a Linux machine in a Nordic data centre. The VPS catalogue is the entry point: KVM-virtualised slices on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hosts, NVMe storage local to the hypervisor, 1 Gbps unmetered uplinks, IPv4 and IPv6 included. Plans start at €4 a month, scale through 64-vCPU / 128 GB monsters, and stop where a dedicated server starts making more economic sense.
We picked KVM because it is the hypervisor the Linux kernel community actually develops, the one with the best long-running track record on security boundaries between tenants, and the one whose snapshot, live-migration and resource-isolation primitives are mature enough to operate at scale without surprises. There is no OpenVZ, no LXC-shared-kernel weirdness, no container-pretending-to-be-a-VM.
What makes a NordBastion VPS different from a generic VPS is the layer above the hypervisor: KYC-free signup, cryptocurrency-only payment, a warrant canary, real Tor support and an operational philosophy that treats the customer's legal identity as something the host should not collect.
The pages that lean on this term.
The questions people actually ask.
What is the difference between a VPS and shared hosting?
Shared hosting gives you a folder on a server, a control panel and the right to install whatever PHP applications the host's control panel supports. A VPS gives you the whole server — root SSH access, your own kernel, any operating system you want to install, any service you want to bind to any port. Shared hosting is constrained; a VPS is a Linux box.
What is the difference between a VPS and a dedicated server?
A VPS shares the underlying physical hardware with other tenants; a dedicated server is your machine alone. VPSes are cheaper, faster to provision and easier to scale; dedicated servers offer guaranteed performance, no noisy neighbours and access to hardware features (raw disk, hardware RAID, IPMI) that virtualisation typically hides. For most workloads under a few hundred GB of RAM, a VPS is the right tool.
Do I get root on a NordBastion VPS?
Yes. Every plan ships with full root SSH access, kernel-of-your-choice via cloud images or ISO upload, IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, and a control panel that mostly stays out of your way. There is no managed-services upsell layer between you and the machine.
Can I run a VPS without giving my legal name?
On NordBastion, yes — that is the entire premise of the site. Signup takes an email address and a password; payment clears in Bitcoin, Lightning or Monero. We never ask for legal name, address, phone number, government ID or proof of address.