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What is anonymous website hosting?
Anonymous website hosting is a type of web hosting that allows website owners to keep their personal information hidden from the public and it can be a great way to protect your identity.
Hosting your website anonymously means that your identity will remain confidential and your website will be more difficult to track.
This can be achieved through the use of anonymous website hosting with anonymous domain names and IP addresses all hosted offshore.
In this post, I hope to explore some of the various intricacies of anonymous web hosting to give you a better idea of what exactly anonymous web hosting is, as well as give you some ideas on how to make your website as anonymous as possible.
Where to get anonymous website hosting.
The fastest and easiest way to get anonymous website hosting is to go with an Offshore Web Hosting provider like Orangewebsite, based in Iceland.
They can easily walk you through the steps of anonymous website hosting so that your website is up and running in no time. Anonymously, of course!
Can you own a website anonymously?
There is no doubt that you can own a website anonymously. The real question is, “how anonymous do you want to be in owning a website?”
You can for example, own a domain name and have it hosted anonymously. You can also pay for hosting and the custom domain name anonymously.
Various hosting providers in various countries throughout the world have privacy laws. Some countries’ privacy laws are much stronger than others.
So some countries may have privacy laws that block other countries’ intelligence services or other governmental bodies like law enforcement and tax authorities from finding out who owns a website.
However, you can be guaranteed that the country who hosts those “anonymous websites” do know who owns the websites hosted within its borders.
What are the benefits of anonymous web hosting?
Benefits of anonymous web hosting can be as simple as being spared from receiving all kinds of spam, to freedom of speech protection, all the way to even tax evasion as well as fleeing from the law or regulators in a particular country.
However, most people who seek out anonymous web hosting are doing it more or less for ecommerce.
Perhaps they have certain products or services that they wish to sell over the internet, but they don’t want their name or their identity to be seen or known about.
Maybe they also deal in questionable content that they wish to publish or sell as well.
How to host a website anonymously fast and easy.
Here are the steps on how to anonymously host a website, the fast and easy way:
- Get a VPN (Anonymously, if you can).
- Get an anonymous email address.
- Register an anonymous domain name.
- Get anonymous hosting.
- Pay for your anonymous domain name and hosting anonymously.
Here’s a post, “How to make an anonymous website. Step by step.” for more details on the steps above.
Going beyond “Whois privacy protection” for “Privacy”.
First, you would need to determine just how anonymous you want to be. Most Domain Name Registrars offer “Whois” protection nowadays free of charge and include it with domain name registration.
However, simply hiding your name, with “Whois” protection, may not be enough, although it will help most, you may require more confidentiality.
If this is the case, you should look at the following options for increasing your privacy:
For starters, you can increase your privacy and minimize your exposure by not registering a domain in your name, not registering hosting in your name and not using a credit card or any other payment method in your name.
In addition, I wouldn’t openly give out your IP or your email address, I wouldn’t use Google Analytics, and I certainly wouldn’t discuss your website openly.
By just following each of these mentioned above, you will reduce the chances of your identity being discovered.
Now, let’s go over how someone could discover your identity, before you go about disguising it.
Knowing how someone can discover who you are beforehand can help you better disguise yourself and your identity. This way you can take the right steps going forward to ensuring your website’s anonymity.
Learning how someone can discover your website’s identity.
Here’s how, off hand, someone could find out who you are:
- They could look up the WHOIS record for a particular domain.
- IP addresses can be discovered from headers in emails you send. They could also be found in server logs.
- They could reverse engineer a website’s domain name, then go through hosting providers’ account records, domain registrars records and ISP’s to uncover the name or owner behind each.
- They can contact the banks of credit cards or other payment methods used to find a buyer’s personal details, although they would need some form of authorizations and permissions to do so, like a court order or if they are from law enforcement.
- They can dig into your Google Analytics account information, this works if you’re tracking more than one site on the same account.
Ways to limit your online exposure.
However, here are some ways to limit your exposure from the tactics used above.
The first and easiest way is to simply register with a free blogging platform like Blogger, Tumblr or even WordPress.com.
When you do have to provide information you can simply set up an alias gmail account, use false names etc. Always use a VPN when setting up or accessing these free options just to be on the safe side.
Though, the above free methods can restrict your abilities for monetization etc.
Therefore, the best way to go anonymous that will give you the most flexibility as possible would be the following:
- Use a third party, like an anonymous registration service, to register a domain name and hosting for you. Using an anonymous hosting service allows you to register under a pseudonym and without providing a postal address. Check out: Anonymous Speech.
- Get an offshore hosting provider like OrangeWebsite.com.
- Set up fake email addresses, like through gmail. Make sure you use a VPN when setting these fake email addresses up and always when accessing them.
- Pay using Bitcoin or some other crypto or confidential method. Check out this post here, “How to buy a Domain Name anonymously. Anonymous Domain Name FAQs” where I go into a little more detail on how to do just that.
- Always remember that when setting everything up even though third parties, hosting, domain name registrations, payments etc. you use a VPN.
That’s it really.
Covering your tracks online.
Here are a few more methods that you can use to cover your tracks when accessing your site like:
- Protecting your IP address by using a VPN such as HideMyAss whenever connecting to the Internet. You can use the Tor network.
- Again, always be sure to turn the VPN or Tor connection on before accessing your website or registering for any services related to your website.
Using Offshore Hosting.
You should note that registering a domain and hosting it in a country outside of your own country’s jurisdiction like in Iceland with OrangeWebsite.com, can add an extra barrier. Especially when it comes to “free speech” protection.
Although the above methods aren’t totally foolproof and won’t alone protect your identity from someone determined to find it, when all added together, they will make it much harder to discover your identity.
You could go even farther and add deeper layers to protect your identity, but they are beyond the scope of this post.
Some additional simple ways to keep your website more anonymous.
Some simple things you might want to consider for now though would be switching from a shared hosting plan to another more exclusive type hosting like Cloud Hosting, VPS or even a Dedicated Server Hosting. Why?
It’s rather easy, even with Whois protection, to do a lookup and see what other sites are hosted on your shared server, then again, reverse engineer it.
For example, if you have a bunch of sites on a shared hosting plan, more than likely they are also on the same shared server.
A competitor can then find you by researching each of those sites. You may actually leave enough information on each of those so that they could piece together a profile about you, your niches etc. your server neighbors are.
Lots of sites can live on the same IP address, so this may not at first, obviously pinpoint directly to you, but it narrows the list.
Anonymous website hosting conclusions.
For most of us, simply registering your domain name with “Whois privacy protection” is enough to keep your website fairly anonymous.
What Whois protection will do mostly is prevent spammers and scammers from finding you directly through your website.
However, for those who really want to go deep or at least deeper than simple “Whois protection”, then the above ways should help keep your website, your domain name and hosting as anonymous as possible.
Many who want to express themselves online often feel that they are hindered by the authorities or even the societies they live in. Even though many, ironically, may live in supposedly free and democratic societies which supposedly gives them freedom of speech protection.
Many still feel this “freedom of speech” protection isn’t enough.
If this is the case for you or for your thoughts, opinions and views, then I would seriously consider using a web hosting provider offshore like Orangewebsite.com.
Orangewebsite.com is based in Iceland and not only can you get anonymous web hosting through them, but Iceland also has some of the strictest privacy and freedom of speech protection laws on the planet.
Whichever way you choose to have your website and your identity remain anonymous, at least you now know there are ways to do so.
