GitLab VS Packetra

Packetra's answer:

It depends what you are weighing.

Against mainstream hosts like DigitalOcean or Hostinger, the difference is what we ask for and what we keep. No identity verification, non-custodial crypto payment, and jurisdictions chosen for their data protection law rather than for latency alone.

Against the more established privacy hosts, the difference is breadth and usability. Many of them are VPS-only or lean heavily on ideology. We run shared hosting, WordPress hosting, Cloud VPS and dedicated servers, with cPanel or DirectAdmin available, so it works as an ordinary long-term host for ordinary projects rather than only for people who already know exactly what they want.

Where we are the weaker choice: we launched in 2025, so we have a shorter public track record than providers who have been around for a decade. If length of history is your main criterion, that is a fair reason to pick someone else.

Packetra's answer:

People who want ordinary, reliable hosting without handing over more personal data than the transaction requires.

In practice that is developers and site owners who prefer to pay in Monero or Bitcoin, journalists and researchers who care which country their data sits in, small businesses that want European data sovereignty without an enterprise contract, and self-hosters running their own mail, VPN, Nextcloud or game servers.

The common thread is data minimisation as a default rather than a feature you have to hunt for. Most are not doing anything unusual. They simply do not think a hosting provider needs their passport to sell them a server.

Packetra's answer:

• KVM virtualisation on our own hardware, with full root access and no overselling of allocated resources
• WHMCS for billing and account management
• BTCPay Server, self-hosted on our own infrastructure, for Monero and Bitcoin payments with no third-party processor
• Plausible Analytics, self-hosted, so visitor data never leaves our infrastructure
• cPanel and DirectAdmin available on shared and VPS plans, or a bare OS if you would rather build it yourself
• NVMe SSD storage throughout
• Full IPv4 and IPv6 support, with optional rDNS

Packetra's answer:

Two things, and the combination is rare.

First, the crypto payments are non-custodial. Monero and Bitcoin go through a BTCPay Server instance we host ourselves on our own infrastructure, straight on-chain, with no third-party payment processor sitting between you and us. Most hosts that advertise crypto are routing you through a gateway that collects its own data.

Second, both locations are our own infrastructure rather than resold capacity in a third country. A lot of providers marketed as offshore are reselling somewhere else entirely, which means the jurisdiction claim does not survive contact with a legal request. Ours is Switzerland and Finland, and we can stand behind what that means.

On top of that: an account needs only an email address and a password, KYC is never requested at any stage, and support is handled directly by our own team rather than an outsourced first line.

Packetra's answer:

Packetra launched in December 2025, built by people who had spent years inside the hosting industry and kept running into the same gap.

Providers that took privacy seriously were usually narrow: VPS only, aimed at people who already knew exactly what they wanted, and often carrying a strong ideological framing. Providers that were easy to use collected far more data than the transaction needed, and increasingly demanded identity documents to sell a server.

There was no obvious reason those had to be a trade-off. So we built a host where signup takes an email address, crypto payments run through our own BTCPay Server rather than a third-party processor, and the product range covers ordinary needs from shared hosting up to dedicated servers.

The two locations were chosen for their law rather than their marketing value. Switzerland sits outside the EU under the Federal Act on Data Protection. Finland has full GDPR coverage, strong constitutional privacy protection, and consistently ranks in the global top three for press freedom.

The company is bootstrapped and operates as ASPB Limited.