Offshore hosting industry has rapidly evolved from a pesky little brother to most mainland hosting giants into the leading hosting service provider catering to many small and average business projects that, by their nature, demand a higher degree of privacy and information security than most mainstream providers can offer.

Projects like electronic money (e-currency) services, high-yield investment funds and various merchants in developing and developed countries alike have long been opting for offshore server hosting rather than a standard hosting solution. Others include purely informative websites which need more freedom (e.g. political) for the kind of web contents they need to publish online.

Which offshore hosting plan to choose?

The short answer to this question would be "the one you can afford"... at the same time there are some important considerations that you need to keep in mind.

From my experience, offshore shared and VPS (virtual server) solutions are much less stable and reliable than their mainstream hosting counterparts (like say, a shared plan on a U.S. or U.K. server). The reason behind this is the nature of the websites themselves hosted on such servers.

Offshore anonymous shared plans usually attract a lot of "fly-by-night" scammers who often abuse the servers in various ways and may even bring on a DDOS attack from a competitor or third party affected by their websites.

An offshore VPS on a dedicated IP may be a better option but here again, "bad boys" may bring down MySQL, consume all RAM or CPU power and make all other plans on the server suffer. Additionally, overall slower network connections may only make these issues worse.

An offshore dedicated server is by all means the best option. If your online business has enough potential to generate hundreds of dollars in monthly sales, why would you go with a shared or VPS plan and risk losing your clients due to a likely downtime or slow connection speed? In those cases, offshore dedicated hosting is a better alternative that will give you peace of mind.