Pre-installed Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 LTS on every tier, with PPAs, snap, HWE kernels and Ubuntu Pro all supported. Stock Canonical builds — no NordBastion patches, no telemetry agent beyond the upstream defaults you can disable.
Pre-installed Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 LTS images on every tier — Sentinel to Citadel, no surcharge.
PPAs, snap, HWE kernels and Ubuntu Pro all just work — stock Canonical builds with no NordBastion patches in the chain.
Pinned to one of four Nordic constitutional jurisdictions — Sweden, Finland, Norway or Iceland — paid in Bitcoin or Monero.
When a vendor publishes installation instructions for their database, observability agent or runtime, the first stanza overwhelmingly assumes Ubuntu LTS — apt-get install, an add-apt-repository line, a curl-piped GPG key. Ubuntu on NordBastion means one fewer translation layer between an upstream runbook and a working server.
Compared with Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS sits one step closer to upstream — newer userland, newer toolchains, more recent backports of common server software inside the LTS window. HWE kernels keep you on a modern 6.x without leaving LTS. The trade is a marginally larger attack surface for a meaningfully easier deployment story.
Snap packages are useful for self-contained services that you want isolated from the rest of the system — a Certbot, a Nextcloud, a microk8s. On NordBastion the snap channel is reachable and unrate-limited; if you do not want it, apt purge snapd works and the 24.04 minimal image ships without it. Snap is offered, not imposed.
| Image | Slug | Use case |
|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) | ubuntu-24.04 |
Current LTS — supported by Canonical until April 2029, the default pick for a new Ubuntu server in 2026. |
| Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) | ubuntu-22.04 |
Previous LTS, supported until April 2027 — for runbooks and vendor packages that have not yet been re-tested on Noble. |
| Ubuntu 24.04 minimal | ubuntu-24.04-min |
Cloud-image minimal — no snaps, no recommended packages, ~420 MB base for tightly-scoped sidecars and worker VMs. |
| Ubuntu 24.04 + Docker | ubuntu-24.04-docker |
Docker engine + compose plugin from the official Docker apt repo (not the distro snap), ready for docker compose up. |
| Ubuntu 24.04 + WireGuard | ubuntu-24.04-wg |
Kernel module and wg-quick pre-configured — useful as a Nordic exit node, a personal VPN endpoint or a site-to-site terminator. |
Custom ISO mount available for any Ubuntu interim release or daily build on request — ticket-free via the panel.
Same Debian-family apt tooling, plus the PPAs, snaps and vendor docs that overwhelmingly target Ubuntu LTS first. Newer userland than Debian inside an LTS window; HWE kernel keeps you on a modern 6.x. The path of least resistance for production.
Conservative package set, five-year support window, dist-upgrade path that almost always works. Stock kernel, no telemetry, no snap. See /debian-vps/ for the boring-correct default.
Rolling release, no stable freeze, latest upstream kernel and userland, AUR access. The cost is the rolling discipline. A dedicated Arch Linux VPS page is forthcoming at /arch-linux-vps/.
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 120 GB NVMe. Ubuntu 24.04 minimal here runs a Certbot snap, a Caddy reverse proxy, a Tailscale exit node or a Mosquitto broker with headroom for logs.
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 240 GB NVMe. The sweet spot for one production application — a Postgres from the official PGDG PPA, a node.js runtime, a Mastodon up to a few thousand users.
8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 480 GB NVMe. Comfortable for a docker compose stack with database, queue, web and worker, or a microk8s single-node cluster for staging.
Full tier line — Sentinel · Garrison · Ravelin · Bulwark · Citadel — on /vps/.
For most modern stacks — an off-the-shelf observability agent, a database whose vendor publishes a PPA, a runtime whose install script greps for /etc/lsb-release — Ubuntu is the operating system that requires the fewest deviations from the upstream documentation. Pairing it with a Nordic KYC-free host means you keep that ease without giving up jurisdiction or paying with identity.
Pick Debian if you value the conservative package set and stock kernel above all. Pick Arch if you genuinely need today's upstream. Pick Ubuntu when the runbook already says "apt install".
The questions operators actually ask before deploying an Ubuntu LTS server on a privacy-first host.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) as the current LTS default, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) for runbooks that have not yet been re-validated against Noble, plus the minimal, Docker-preinstalled and WireGuard-preinstalled variants of 24.04. Interim releases (24.10, 25.04) are not in the panel by default — they have only nine months of support and are a poor fit for unattended production — but can be installed on request via the ISO-mount workflow.
Yes. The default image enables main, universe and restricted; multiverse is one apt edit away. add-apt-repository ppa:... works against any Launchpad PPA — the NordBastion firewall does not block ppa.launchpadcontent.net or any Ubuntu mirror. PPAs are the path of least resistance for vendors who target Ubuntu first (Caddy, Tailscale, Ondrej PHP, kubic, etc.).
The default 24.04 image keeps snapd installed (because lxd and a few system tools rely on it), but no end-user snaps are pre-seeded. If you want a snap-free system, apt purge snapd && apt-mark hold snapd is supported and will not break the rest of the image. The 24.04 minimal image ships without snapd at all.
22.04 ships with the HWE kernel rolling forward on the standard Canonical cadence — you stay on a recent 6.x kernel without leaving LTS. 24.04 only has the GA kernel for now (HWE arrives with 24.04.2). Both are stock Canonical builds; we do not patch the kernel and we do not pin you to an older series.
You can attach a personal Ubuntu Pro token (free for individual use up to five machines) and enable ESM, livepatch and FIPS exactly as you would on any other host — pro attach
Yes, scoped to the security pocket (-security and ESM if you attach Pro), so USN-tagged advisories install automatically without rebooting. Kernel updates that need a reboot are flagged in /var/run/reboot-required; we do not auto-reboot your server.
Yes — do-release-upgrade is supported and tested on NordBastion images. Snapshot the VPS first; the panel provides one-click rollback if anything in your stack does not survive the cross-major bump. As a rule of thumb the LTS-to-LTS upgrade is reliable for stock Ubuntu services; third-party PPAs are the usual source of friction.
Yes. /etc/apt/sources.list defaults to archive.ubuntu.com, which is geo-balanced — from any of the four Nordic bastions you typically resolve to se.archive.ubuntu.com or fi.archive.ubuntu.com. You can pin a specific country mirror at any time without breaking package signatures.
Private hosting, built in the North.
