In a digital world where free expression is often threatened by takedowns and legal pressure, UnderHost has emerged as a haven for privacy-focused, offshore hosting.
In this exclusive interview with
Website Planet, Emilie Vandenbosch shares how the company was founded out of necessity—to protect independent voices, whistleblowers, and creators from arbitrary censorship. Powered by cutting-edge technologies like NVMe SSDs, CloudLinux, and ServerShield, UnderHost combines speed, security, and resilience across a globally distributed, eco-conscious infrastructure.
With 24/7 in-house support and a mission rooted in digital freedom, UnderHost stands out as a trusted partner for those who need more than just standard hosting.
What motivated UnderHost to specialize in offshore hosting with privacy and DMCA-free policies?
The short answer? Necessity. The internet’s promise of free expression was being undermined by takedowns targeting controversial but legal content. UnderHost exists to fix that.. We kept seeing great projects, whistleblower sites, indie journalists, and even artists pushing boundaries get shut down or silenced because their hosting providers folded under legal pressure. So we built UnderHost around a simple idea: the internet should be a place for free expression, not just for those who fit neatly into “acceptable” content boxes.
Our offshore infrastructure lets us offer DMCA-tolerant hosting while staying fully compliant with local laws in places like Canada, the Netherlands, the Caribbean, Moldova, Sweden, and even Russia.
That means clients working with sensitive topics, crypto, or adult content. Lots of our clients are startups in blockchain and AI, where IP laws are murky. The rest? Everyone from indie filmmakers to NGOs archiving controversial research they can operate without fear of arbitrary takedowns. It’s not about skirting rules, it’s about ensuring privacy and autonomy aren’t luxuries.
How do technologies like NVMe SSD, CloudLinux, and NGINX boost performance for your hosting services?
Oh, this is where we geek out! We’ve invested in NVMe SSDs for our shared hosting and cloud server, and it’s also available on dedicated servers, which significantly reduces latency and improves I/O-heavy workloads. Think of it like building a sports car.
NVMe SSDs are the turbocharged engine; they handle data at ludicrous speeds (we’re talking 5–7x faster than traditional SSDs). Perfect for e-commerce sites or forums where every millisecond of lag costs users. This means your database queries or WooCommerce checkouts don’t bottleneck.
On our shared hosting, we use CloudLinux, which is the suspension system. It keeps every account in its own “bubble,” so one spammy neighbour can’t drag down the whole server. Stability, even when traffic spikes. NGINX? That’s our aerodynamic design. It juggles thousands of connections at once without breaking a sweat, so sites stay snappy under heavy loads.
We optimize our NGINX web server to perfection on shared hosting, and our team tailors it to the Cloud, Dedicated Server system for our client-specific website and needs. UnderHost has been in business since 2007, so we have almost two decades of perfecting our sports car.
Combine all three, and you’ve got hosting that’s fast, fair, and nearly impossible to crash. Pair that with our High Availability cloud or Complex setup with load balancing in multiple regions, and a real server management engineer, and you do not have to worry about being online or missing a sale.
Can you explain how features like UnderMail and ServerShield contribute to email reliability and overall security?
UnderMail is our dedicated email reliability platform, designed for high deliverability and intelligent filtering. We monitor real-time blackhole lists (RBLs) and proactively delist affected IPs to maintain the sender’s reputation. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are fully configured by default; no technical setup is required.
Our adaptive spam filtering uses sentiment-aware NLP models to catch emotionally manipulative phishing emails that traditional filters often miss. If a sending IP begins to show signs of being flagged (due to, for example, a compromised form), emails are rerouted automatically through clean channels. UnderMail ensures your emails actually arrive, no blacklisting, no phishing leaks.
ServerShield, on the other hand, secures the broader hosting environment with AI-enhanced protection. It’s like a 24/7 AI bodyguard for your infrastructure.
We use behavioral threat detection that learns the typical behavior of each site and flags anomalies such as unusual file uploads or suspicious bot activity. Our system also includes real-time DDoS mitigation; instead of relying on simple rate-limiting, it analyzes traffic patterns to detect and isolate malicious activity within seconds, while allowing legitimate users to remain unaffected.
Additionally, our self-learning Web Application Firewall (WAF) automatically updates itself by studying attack trends across our global network. For example, if a new SQL injection technique is detected in one region, all ServerShield-protected sites receive updated protection within minutes.
Together, these systems ensure that both your emails and your infrastructure stay secure, reliable, and resilient, without requiring constant oversight. Together, they mean fewer headaches and more uptime.
What are the benefits of choosing your managed business or WordPress hosting versus standard shared plans?
Both our Managed Business Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting are fully managed solutions, but they’re tailored to serve very different needs and performance expectations.
Managed Business Hosting would be best for agencies, SaaS applications, or businesses running custom websites.
Our business hosting is essentially a Managed Cloud environment; each account gets guaranteed CPU and RAM allocations, with no competition from other users (“noisy neighbours”). We can provide a staging environment, load balancing, and even high availability via multiple locations with dev/stage/production environments to allow businesses to test before deploying live or staying just live. These include cPanel, proactive monitoring, off-site backups, and DDoS protection with high-performance NVMe SSD storage and multi-core Intel® Xeon CPUs to ensure consistently fast response times.
This is an ideal choice for businesses that need more control, scalability, and reliability than traditional shared hosting can offer, without moving to a full bare-metal solution or needing to upgrade/downgrade during the years, like just before black friday for example.
Our Managed WordPress Hosting is built for WordPress Bloggers, eCommerce businesses (like WooCommerce), membership sites, and anything running on WordPress.
About the same as managed business, they are fully managed instances but on shared hosting, they offer more “RAW” resource than our normal shared hosting as WordPress tends to use a lot of resources, especially with WooCommerce and tons of products, and plugins, we use redis object caching, OPcode preloading, and real-time image compression come standard paired with our CDN.
We have built an AI-powered plugin that we use to monitor for vulnerabilities and version conflicts, and even recommend safer alternatives on WordPress plugins. Again, you can use a one-click staging to quickly clone your site to test updates without downtime or risk. We do have 24/7 threat monitoring, malware scanning, and automatic patching.
With everything optimized specifically for WordPress, it’s a plug-and-play experience for those who want performance, security, and peace of mind without technical overhead.
How does UnderHost’s global infrastructure, multiple data centers, and renewable energy enhance service resilience and sustainability?
At UnderHost, diversity and distribution are at the core of our infrastructure strategy. We operate in over a dozen premium data centers across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, including locations like Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Canada, and Curaçao. This offers two critical advantages. First is performance through proximity: With servers closer to end-users, latency is minimized, and websites load faster, whether your visitors are in Bangkok, Berlin, or Bogotá. Secondly, using our multi-location architecture means traffic can be seamlessly rerouted in the rare event of a local outage, ensuring uninterrupted service and uptime.
To support long-term sustainability, we’ve also partnered with data centers in Canada and the Netherlands that run entirely on 100% renewable energy sourced from wind and hydroelectric power. These green-powered facilities reduce our environmental impact while maintaining enterprise-grade performance.
All our locations share a high standard, such as redundant power systems (UPS + generators), 24/7 monitoring and physical security, advanced cooling systems, high-speed Tier-1 connectivity from top carriers, ISO-certified operations, and disaster recovery protocols.
Our infrastructure is not just about keeping sites online; it’s about doing so reliably, globally, and responsibly. We don’t just aim for uptime, we do it sustainably.
With instant setup and 24/7 support, what makes your customer service approach stand out?
Here’s the truth: Most hosting support is awful. Ours isn’t. Every ticket goes to an in-house expert, day or night, no outsourcing, no scripted replies, we treat it like a relationship. We approach every interaction as a conversation, not a transaction. Whether you’re launching your first website or migrating 200GB of data, you’ll always talk to a real human, no matter the hour. What sets us apart is our commitment to real human support, available 24/7. No chatbots giving you the runaround at 3 AM.
Our global support team consists of seasoned technicians who offer immediate, meaningful help, something our clients thank us for again and again. That being said, we’ve also introduced Winston, our AI assistant designed to provide fast, intelligent responses on everything from server setup to SEO and coding guidance. It’s perfect for users who need quick answers, while our human support team remains on standby for more complex or sensitive issues.
Winston is available at any time via “Live Chat” while all tickets are handled by professionals, no third party, everything in-house. For clients managing business-critical infrastructure, our Server Management Services offer RHCE-certified administration, including:
Proactive monitoring, Security hardening, Emergency recovery, Server migrations with zero downtime, Full Linux and Windows support, and because our clients span the globe, we’ve invested in multilingual support, currently available in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese, with more languages on the way. We want everyone to feel at home when they reach out to us.
We handle migrations manually to ensure zero data loss and optimize each site along the way. We don’t just move you, we improve your setup during the process. In short, our service stands out because we treat support as a relationship. We combine AI efficiency, expert human oversight, and global accessibility to provide peace of mind, whether that’s your first blog, your client’s app, or a distributed cloud platform with 10 million monthly visitors.
Find out more at:
www.underhost.com
