Generally offshore means “in a different country” or “outside the country” or simply “abroad”. In the old days, waterways were the mode of transport for longer distances. Valuable people used to build houses in friend countries to hide their asses in difficult times. The purpose of offshore hosting is similar. Generally living in the US and hosting your site in India or vice versa is usually not called “offshore hosting”. The data centers of these countries will not tolerate you if someone legally attacks you. Most of these web hosts provide globalized service which means they pay local taxes for your payment.
We do not say Linode or Digital Oceans are offshore hosts. Offshore hosting typically shields personal identifiers. Probably they do not show their source of earnings to the taxation system (which increases the tax). Often they are legitimate companies but can be completely illegal or a dubious business.
Offshore hosting is a phrase which probably means “hosting in a safe country”. The offshore hosts commit to privacy, have liberal fair usage policies, accept cryptocurrencies and sometimes do not care about DMCA notices. Some of these only respond to a real court order, some even does not care court of another country. Depending on the content you want to publish, you have to seek an offshore country and host which is supportive of your need. The phrase offshore hosting is ill-defined.
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Also, the offshore hosting system makes the taxation system difficult to trace out the source of money. However, one can not use Google AdSense to make money with offshore hosting, or rather it is useless to do so.
What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Offshore Hosting?
Advantages
- Usually affordable pricing for a shared server and VPS
- Privacy enhanced
- Anonymous payment methods are accepted
Disadvantages
- Rights on domain name or server is limited
- Often the services are dubious
- Pricing for a dedicated server can be very high
- Your country’s law probably can not save you from getting cheated
Should We Use Offshore Hosting?
That depends upon you. Offshore hosting itself is not illegal. We do not need offshore hosting for hosting a normal technology blog. Often the sponsors want legitimate invoices from the site owners. The legitimate usage of offshore hosting is for freedom of speech, freedom of the press etc.
An example usage of offshore hosting is for the publication of legitimate pornographic content (which comes under the header of “freedom of speech”).
There are zillions of illegitimate usages which are out of our scope to research. The purpose of our website is not to educate “how to operate an illegal business”.
