This HostSailor review would cater to the needs of two types of readers, if you’re looking for an offshore hosting company, an anonymous hosting company, or a combination of both.
Beware though, HostSailor isn’t a company as Anonymous as the last company we reviewed in our webcare360 and BulletproofWeb, Shinjiru or Mivocloud.
In case you’re wondering, none of these reviews are sponsored in the least bit. It’s just that we spend some time with the company (its servers, website, support-staff etc.), conduct some tests and lay out the results for you folks here.
The primary goal is to help you understand and gauge how “anonymous” any of these companies are before you go with them. A complete list of everything that we’d talk about would include:
- Anonymity
- Server Locations.
- Payment Modes.
- Restricted/ Prohibited Content.
- Servers and Pricing Plans.
HostSailor Hosting Quick Overview
Before we get into the fine-print of this HostSailor Review, here are the primary points which we believe sum the company up in its entirety: 
- Primary URL: http://hostsailor.com
- Servers in: Netherlands, Romania.
- Payment Methods: BTC + AltCoins + Fiat.
- Cheapest Plan: $0.95/month.
- Servers: Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting.
- DMCA Ignored: No.
- Content Not Allowed: Check AUP Section.
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Is HostSailor Anonymous?
Not at all. Note that it’s not an “anonymous” Offshore hosting company, rather just an “offshore hosting company”. Calling it a Bitcoin Hosting company is correct as well, but it’s just not anonymous.
For starters, its Privacy Policy states that a user would need to divulge a handful of personal information, which may include:
- Name
- Address
- Mobile (and even Landline number)
- Credit card numbers and other details (for, or during payments).
Additionally, other information such as a user’s IP address, time-on-site, time on individual pages etc. too are collected.
They’ve also mentioned that they not only disclose personal information to law enforcement agencies, but even report from their own end if any misuse, or illegal activity is found on the user’s behalf.
Furthermore, this may be done without any notice or information to the user which is the real deal-breaker here.
Not that it would make a huge difference, but they do accept Payments via Cryptocurrencies.
So in other words, it’s quite the opposite of “anonymous”. It however is a GDPR-respecting company and hence some users (depending on their citizenship) gain a bit of control over their personal information.
What are the HostSailor Server Locations?
If you’re one of those users looking for just “offshore hosting” solutions, in that case HostSailor may be a viable option for you.
It offers servers from Netherlands (Amsterdam/ Rotterdam/ Naaldwijk) as well as from Romania.
While it’s a strictly “by the books” company, these locations will still offer a bit more liberty than most other countries on the planet.
That’s pertaining to the fact that Netherlands and Romania both are pretty liberal and comparatively less-conservative with their digital laws as compared to most other nations.
Payment Modes
So how can you pay on HostSailor? Well the company accepts both Fiat and Cryptocurrency payments.
Infact, the list of available payment modes is probably one of the most varied we’ve ever seen.
Fiat payments can be made via:
- PayPal, Skrill, Perfect Money, WebMoney, AliPay, iDeal, EPS, Credit/Debit Cards, GiroPay, Sofort, UnionPay, QiWi, PaySafeCard, Bank Transfers, And even MoneyGram.
As for Crypto payments, they can be made in:
- Bitcoins and number of other altcoins.
All in all, I doubt any of us would run out of ways to pay the company.
What Content Isn’t Allowed on HostSailor?
Why would we look for an anonymous offshore Bitcoin Hosting company? Primarily because the content we’re trying to host isn’t exactly welcomed in our countries, isn’t that right?
Well, as mentioned multiple times in this HostSailor review, the company is religiously legal (which is a good thing for the most part).
Hence, nothing even remotely illegal is allowed on the servers. It however serves as a secure platform for those who need freedom of speech and public opinion (without violating any laws).
A more comprehensive list of content which isn’t allowed on the servers would include:
- Child Porn
- Hate Speech.
- Trade Secrets
- Copyrighted content.
- Defamatory content.
- Fraudulent sites.
- Anything else which is illegal.
As far as governing laws are concerned, from its T&C it seems the laws of UAE (where the company is Headquartered) as well as the laws of the server-country are applicable.
How Good are HostSailor Servers?
As is the tradition, we’d subject the company to a number of tests. But before our personal, third-party tests, it should be mentioned that the company provides an official looking-glass.
Using it, we pinged the provided IPv4 Address (server-location: Amsterdam, Netherlands), and here are the results:
These are pretty impressive (for all the server-locations that we tested for). But, shouldn’t we also get some of our other tests done?
We’d be testing https://hostsailor.com to get a rough idea of its servers. We did verify that the URL is hosted on the company’s own servers (verify):
However, it may be that the servers provided to users are completely different in which case the tests below wouldn’t be correct or true.
Page Load-Time Test
How long does the URL take to load is what we’ll verify in this test. Well the site loaded fastest from London, and only required 1.99seconds (verify). Sites loading below 2seconds are my favourite (and Google’s , and everyone else’s I suppose).
It required 2.29Seconds from USA, 2.07 seconds from Germany and 3.03 seconds from South America.
This hints at an average load-time of 2 seconds, for the page which was exactly 2.3MB in size, which in my personal opinion is impressive.
Well the page load-time may be impressive only because of proper optimization or lower page size, or is it impressive because the servers are just that good?
Server Response Time
The Server Response time would basically measure the time the server needs, to respond to the browser’s request of loading the site’s HTML. The SRT effects the load-time of a page quite significantly.
Well here are the SRT-test results obtained for HostSailor (verify):
I must admit, this probably is “the best”, or atleast one of the top 3 fastest SRT results we’ve ever seen. The average SRT requirement for most locations is below 4ms!
This proves that the 2 second load-time shown in the load-time test is actually a “slow result” if the SRT is taken into account. Actual results for sites hosted on the same servers would probably be a lot faster with proper optimizations.
SRT with Traffic-Hike
These test results have got me on steroids so far, but there’s one last test I’d like to conduct before moving onto a verdict.
What if the results are only good because there’s no traffic on the site? Will it still be equally fast with on a crowded day?
To test just that, we sent 25 of our Virtual friends (bots) to the site. They are the same as “humans” to the servers. Here are the results obtained during the 3minute test:
As is evident, the SRT does spike a bit but nothing that would be a deal-breaker. For e.g. it required 31ms when traffic was at its peak (24VUs). This is just higher than the normal 3ms SRT we got for U.S but still completely impressive.
Download Speed
This is an optional speed-test we conduct whenever a company provides us with a speed-test file. Well, HostSailor does.
We downloaded its 100MB speed-test file, and got a maximum speed of around 3.8Mbps.
Well, this is just about the fastest speed I get on any other download, on any server on my internet connection. So I’d say that’s impressive as well. (And you can always conduct your own speed-tests by going to their looking-glass page).
What are the Available Servers and How much Do they Cost?
This being the last section of this HostSailor review, let’s talk a bit about their servers. The company offers SSD (Shared) Hosting, VPS and Dedicated servers.
The plans can be paid for monthly, or yearly. The cheapest plan for SSD hosting starts at $0.95 USD/month, and goes upto $9.45USD/month.
VPS is divided into OpenVZ, KVM and XEN types. They start as low as $1.99USD/month, and go upto $5.99USD/month.
Netherland-based Dedicated servers start at $68.04USD/month, while Romanian Dedicated servers start at $71.99USD/month.
The company also claims to take weekly-backups of its servers, this however isn’t guaranteed and is more of a goodwill gesture.
Final Words:
So that’s all I had to pour in on this HostSailor Review folks. Yes, the company isn’t as anonymous as bulletproofweb, but the other features are more than impressive.
The speed for one, followed by the comparatively much cheaper pricing plans! Even the payment methods and server locations are pretty favourable.
Buy Your Hosting With Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrency
So if you ask for my personal verdict, I’d say if anonymity isn’t exactly your priority the company might be worth a peek. But hey, this is all me. Why don’t you drop your opinion and thoughts on this HostSailor review in the comments?
