YoHost Delivers Privacy, Security, and High Availability to Clients through Anonymous Hosting and Offshore Business Services

TL; DR: YoHost provides anonymous hosting and robust security tools while offering services that simplify offshore company formation. The host delivers high availability through its datacenters and offers 24/7 engineering support to more than 3,000 customers. Based in Panama, YoHost is well-positioned to assist customers with the ins and outs of offshore formation, including registration and setting up bank accounts. And unlike many hosts and registrars, YoHost privacy protection adds extra layers to guarantee the anonymity of its customers.

Many entrepreneurs worry about their online data being stolen, misused, or even sold. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s annual report revealed the emergence in 2019 of several significant data privacy issues that brought more attention to a global problem.

For website owners, threats to privacy can begin as soon as they register a domain because their names, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers quickly become public through the WHOIS database. That data can end up in the hands of spammers, telemarketers, or others who might use it for malicious purposes.

As a result, many business owners choose online anonymity from the start. YoHost offers private domain registration and anonymous hosting services that keep information private to ensure third parties can’t access it.

“We have always been about providing exactly what we advertise,” said YoHost Founder Glen Mitchel. “We provide completely anonymous hosting. That means we don’t require personal information from the customer who wants to register with us, so there’s none to store or share with anyone.”

The company offers a wide variety of services in addition to anonymous hosting, including dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPS), and even assistance with offshore company formation.

And YoHost, based in Panama, understands the intricacies of developing an offshore presence. That’s why its services include help with registration and opening bank accounts as well as hassle-free domain and site transfers.

YoHost began as a personal project in 2009 with one server for web hosting. It focused on anonymous hosting, private web hosting, and offshore hosting, but the company wasn’t yet involved in virtual private networks (VPN) or dedicated services. New privacy issues were starting to emerge, and Glen saw that his hosting setup could fill a niche by providing private web hosting for corporate customers.

But starting small and offering low-cost plans had its share of challenges.

“That kind of business model, with very cheap hosting packages, can attract customers that aren’t reputable,” said Glen. “We discovered that some people were trying to use our services for different purposes than we thought they would be used for.”

That business model also wasn’t sustainable, especially when the company offered such robust services and support.

“When you sell $5 hosting you need thousands of those clients, and you still need to provide technical support for all of them. But at that time, we could only provide adequate technical support for about 100 customers with all the issues they might have,” Glen said. “And with 100 web hosting clients on one server, if one of them has an issue, the other 99 will start contacting you.”

So the YoHost team decided to change its business model, obtain outside financing, and transition to providing more professional services, including dedicated servers and VPS options.

Those features attracted new types of customers, including marketing companies and offshore businesses — many of them in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries. In turn, that shift helped Glen and his team develop YoHost into a trusted source for businesses — and realize greater ROI.

Today, YoHost offers a premium high-speed network with a worldwide reach. That includes multiple 10Gbps connections at its datacenters in the Netherlands and Switzerland, and DDOS protection included.

The host’s professional service and support teams are available 24/7 for urgent issues, and its engineers are Cisco and Microsoft certified, so they’re up to date on trends and any possible concerns.

Unlike many private domain registrars, YoHost adds extra layers of protection to guarantee complete customer anonymity. And YoHost doesn’t use any customer data for domain registration, in contrast to those that merely layer some protection over a customer’s private data.

Instead, the company uses its own corporate information for all individual domain registrations and adds two-layer privacy protection to a customer’s domain information.

“This assures that their personal information will never leak into the public sphere,” said Glen.

With managed domain registration, a customer’s name, address, and phone number remain confidential, so no personal data is available in the WHOIS database. For completely anonymous domain registration, customers are not required to provide personal information during registration, and YoHost represents them in the registration process.

The host can register almost any domain extension, and can even transfer existing domains onto its private network. It can also transfer a customer’s entire site from its current hosting company. Its domain registration capabilities can also help protect customers from frivilous copyright claims.

“A lot of companies advertise themselves as anonymous/offshore domain registrars but they they go through regular domain registrars. And those companies are very strict with their copyright policies, Glen said. “And we know of cases when registrars simply suspend domain because of frivolous copyright complaints without legal grounds. So it’s very important that services which advertise themselves as anonymous use only trustworthy registrars who do not hold the domain/server because of fake complaint or complaint without legal grounds.”

When YoHost launched in 2009, anonymous and offshore hosting weren’t top of mind for many businesses or individuals. And the company received little traffic from those keywords in online searches.

“As far as I can remember, the term ‘anonymous hosting’ had only something like five or 10 impressions per day,” said Glen.

But that demand quickly grew, and YoHost has been providing anonymous offshore hosting services ever since. Its Linux- and Windows-based dedicated servers boast a 99.9% uptime rate and offer 24/7 network monitoring. Virtual private servers deploy OpenVZ and Xen virtualization technologies that allow YoHost to offer professional offshore cluster hosting.

The company added DDOS-protected VPS with protection up to 500Gbps, enough to mitigate 99.9% of attacks of any kind.

YoHost’s other security services include VPN, remote desktop, remote backup storage, and anonymous SSL certificates. It recently introduced a secure backup service for remote storage in its Switzerland datacenter. That backup ensures no loss of data under any circumstances.

The company’s VPN service grants users secure access to most traffic channels, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, torrents, and VoIP, among others. YoHost does not use virtual servers for VPN but instead leverages high-performing Xeon servers, each connected to a 1 Gbps uplink for professional, trouble-free service.

OpenVPN Access Server software and a static IP address round out its offerings.

YoHost also has plans to add payment gateways and private email servers as those needs continue to grow among its customer base.

“As our own payment processing increases, we’ve been trying to address that issue,” said Glen. “We’ve faced some problems using different providers, so we have some valuable experience, and we’re working on starting our own gateway for handling increased payment volumes.”

The anonymous web hosting and offshore hosting spaces have grown steadily since YoHost was founded in 2009. And both consumer and business concerns over privacy have fueled that interest.

“Now, people are really worried about privacy,” said Glen. “So they’re looking for new web hosting sources where their personal information isn’t stored, or shared, or even required for registration. And that’s helping us attract even more customers.”

The company recently added unmetered high-bandwidth servers for large production environments. And servers with up to 28 cores, 16 hard drives, 256 GB RAM, a 10 Gbps dedicated uplink are also available.

YoHost uses the lessons it has learned as an offshore company — both good and not so good — to serve its customers better and support their needs. And it continues to be honest and transparent with its customers, which is a crucial element in building trust.

“Eventually, they will learn more, and they will understand these subjects,” said Glen. “And we want them to know they can trust us, and to spread the word that we are a trustworthy company that offers trustworthy products.”