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Hosting Stack for Newsrooms Operating Under Authoritarian Regimes
You run a small newsroom whose reporting embarrasses the ruling party of your country. Local hosting providers have already received informal phone calls. Your previous site has been blocked at the ISP level twice. You need infrastructure outside the legal and operational reach of the regime, with a payment trail that does not unmask your funders, and with an admin path that survives staff arrest. This page describes the Anubiz offshore VPS substrate for that scenario - what to deploy, how to size it, how to pay for it.
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Threat model: what the regime can actually do
Authoritarian governments rarely break crypto. They subpoena the hosting provider, pressure the registrar, pay informants inside the local data center, or simply order the national ISP to null-route the IP. A correct stack pushes every choke point outside the country: registrar in a non-cooperating jurisdiction, name servers offshore, primary VPS in Iceland or Romania, CDN with a cooperative TOS, and a Tor onion mirror as fallback when the clearnet domain is censored. The Anubiz VPS gives you the offshore primary; Cloudflare or BunnyCDN handles the front; the onion mirror is plain Nginx on the same box.
Stack and sizing
A typical opposition newsroom runs: Ghost or WordPress for CMS, Postgres or MySQL, Redis for caching, Nginx as reverse proxy, certbot for TLS, a Matrix homeserver (Synapse) for internal editorial chat, and a SecureDrop instance on a dedicated VM for source intake. The CMS and Matrix can share one VPS - 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB NVMe handles 50k uniques per day comfortably. SecureDrop should be a separate VM with its own onion address and zero shared state with the public site. Backups go to a second VPS in a different country, encrypted with restic and a passphrase known only to two staff members.
Anubiz binding and payment
Anubiz offshore VPS plans start at $17.90/mo (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM) and scale to dedicated nodes for newsrooms with traffic spikes. Locations include Iceland, Romania, Netherlands, Ukraine - jurisdictions that do not honor takedown requests from the most common origin regimes. Payment is accepted in Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, USDT and other crypto. Registration requires only an email - use a ProtonMail or Tutanota address created over Tor. We do not log VPS network traffic and do not share data with third parties absent a court order from the country the server sits in. Read our companion pages on /en/securedrop-hosting and /en/matrix-hosting before you provision.
What we do not provide
Anubiz sells the substrate, not the operation. We do not install your CMS, do not manage your SecureDrop, do not configure your Tor hidden service, do not respond to legal requests on your behalf, and do not negotiate with your government. We deliver a clean VPS with root access in an offshore jurisdiction, and we keep that VPS online. The editorial security work - airgap reviewers, threat-modeled sources, hardware tokens, key ceremonies - is yours. If you need help, hire an experienced security engineer; do not improvise.
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Why Anubiz Host
100% async — no calls, no meetings
Delivered in days, not weeks
Full documentation included
Production-grade from day one
Security-first approach
Post-delivery support included
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