Best Storage VPS in 2026 — No KYC, Crypto, From $24

Eight storage hosts scored on privacy, root access and price per TB: 1–5 TB NVMe, Monero in a 19-coin checkout, no documents. FYRHost from $24/mo annual-eff.

Published 2026-08-30 · Updated 2026-10-13 · FYRHost Editorial · 17 min read

40 locations · 19 coins · SLA 99.95% · no KYC · public canary

What counts as a storage VPS here

A storage VPS, for the purposes of this table, is a machine you administer that holds bulk data online: encrypted backups, a Nextcloud or Immich library, a seedbox moving terabytes, a mirrored research dataset. The definition excludes protocol-only boxes from the top of the ranking but not from the table itself — Hetzner's Storage Box is too common an answer for buyers to omit, so it is scored honestly and ranked accordingly.

Seven weighted criteria decide the order, and the weights lean toward private storage on purpose: what a checkout reveals about you counts for more than a couple of euros saved per month. No-KYC carries 25%, crypto payments 20%, root access 15%, performance 15%, locations 10%, price 10%, and extras 5%. The full table with measurement notes sits in the methodology section at the bottom of this page.

The price floor: Storage Depot 1 puts 1 TB of NVMe behind 8 GB of ECC RAM on an unmetered 2.5 Gbps port at $30.00 list, or $24.00/mo on the annual term. Per terabyte, the ladder improves as it climbs — $11.20 effective per TB at Depot 5, where 5 TB rides a 10 Gbps port behind 32 GB of DDR5 ECC memory.

If the workload is specifically backups, the offsite backup guide covers borg and restic repository layout in depth, the crypto checkout walkthrough shows the invoice flow end to end, and the port-25 guide covers the mail-archive case. Everyone else: the ranking below is sorted so the first row you agree with is usually the one you should buy.

TL;DR — the storage ranking

Eight hosts can keep a private archive online, and the workload picks the winner more than the scoreboard does. FYRHost leads at 9.4/10 because it is the only row combining a whole root KVM machine, 1–5 TB of NVMe, unmetered 2.5–10 Gbps ports, document-free signup, and Monero beside eighteen other coins on one invoice. BuyVM wins raw cheapness per gigabyte, Hetzner wins protocol-priced archives, and the managed desks win for buyers who never want to see a shell.

Hyperscalers are absent by definition rather than by oversight: an account that requires identity documents cannot serve private storage, whatever the durability number on the brochure says. OVH, Scaleway, AWS, and their peers therefore never enter the scoring at all. Eight candidates were verified on 2026-09-21 directly on each provider's public pricing page, including the two managed-seedbox rows at the bottom.

Scores are the editorial weighted sum of the seven criteria printed below — no placement is bought and no affiliate links exist on this page. FYRHost sells the top row and says so here, the same disclosure every page on this site carries. If a €/TB spreadsheet is your entire decision, the table will disagree with you, and the spreadsheet is scoring the wrong product.

Read the table as tiers of intent rather than a ladder of quality: rows one and two are infrastructure, rows three and four are jurisdiction plays, the middle is cheap root with strings attached, and the bottom two are managed desks. Matching intent to row saves you more money than any coupon ever will.

The Depot ledger, list and annual

Five Depot tiers cover 1–5 TB, and every one of them is a root KVM machine rather than an attached slab: your filesystem, your encryption, your daemons, your schedule. Depots 1–2 run DDR4 ECC; Depots 3–5 step up to DDR5 with more cores and faster ports, ending at 8 vCPU, 32 GB, and unmetered 10 Gbps. All five ship a dedicated IPv4 + /64, editable PTR, and L3/L4 DDoS filtering in the base price.

The annual term cuts 20 percent across the line: Depot 1 lands at $24.00/mo and Depot 5 at $56.00/mo, and the per-TB curve falls from $24.00 to $11.20 as capacity grows. Snapshots are the one extra worth budgeting — a $9.50 add-on that buys point-in-time rollback before a bad deploy or a corrupted sync does its damage.

When 5 TB stops being enough, the ladder continues onto dedicated chassis rather than ending — same account, same checkout, same no-documents policy. For compute-shaped workloads that merely need some disk, the cheap VPS ranking starts lower; for pure capacity per euro, the honest rivals sit two rows below the top.

Bandwidth accounting is the quiet difference: unmetered means the 2.5–10 Gbps port is a ceiling, not a budget. Backup jobs that would trigger overage letters elsewhere simply run overnight here, which is why the Storage line tolerates a full reseed of a 1 TB repository without a politely worded email arriving afterward.

FYRHost — pros and cons

The Storage line treats big NVMe as the point of the machine rather than an accessory bolted onto a compute plan. That positioning has real costs, printed below with the same bluntness as the wins, because a storage buyer who gets surprised by HDD pricing or a paid snapshot tier has been underserved by the very page that ranked it first.

Pros. Root KVM with 8–32 GB of ECC RAM beside the disks, unmetered 2.5–10 Gbps ports, and signup that never asks for documents — a token or an inbox plus a 12-character password covers it. Nineteen coins clear the invoice, all forty locations bill one list price, L3/L4 filtering is included, and snapshots add rollback for $9.50 when you want it.

Cons. NVMe costs more per terabyte than HDD slabs — BuyVM undercuts the raw €/TB by roughly 5×, and Hetzner by more. Snapshots are a paid extra rather than an included feature. There is no managed option: you run borg, restic, or the backup schedule yourself. Checkout is crypto-only, and the line tops out at 5 TB before a chassis change to dedicated.

For private storage — Nextcloud, media servers, backups under your own keys, seedboxes, datasets — that bundle is the product, and no other row assembles it. Where any single leg of the bundle matters less to you than price, the honest answer is a row below, and the decision tree in a moment says which, in six branches you can walk in a minute.

BuyVM, FlokiNET and 1984 Hosting — pros and cons

Three privacy-flavored rivals earn their places with very different products: one sells cheap attached disks, two sell jurisdiction. Their cons are as structural as their pros, which is what keeps this section short enough to act on — every point below comes from the vendor's own materials during the September pass. Prices are list, converted where the vendor bills in euros.

BuyVM (Frantech). Pros: nobody sells bulk bits cheaper — 256 GB slabs at $1.25/mo, call it $5 per TB; crypto accepted; DDoS filtering free; a Luxembourg operator with a long privacy record. Cons: a slab only attaches to a VM you already rent there, so storage alone is unbuyable; capacity lives on enterprise HDD with an NVMe cache, not pure NVMe; and the map stops at Las Vegas, New Jersey, and Luxembourg.

FlokiNET. Pros: a privacy culture few match — cash-by-mail and Monero both work, KYC stays off by default, and big-disk VPS plans exist in Iceland and Romania. Cons: setup is manual and slower than automated provisioning, the disk ladder climbs less far than a purpose-built storage line, the whole map is four locations, and nothing answers a 2.5–10 Gbps unmetered storage SKU at all.

1984 Hosting. Pros: Icelandic jurisdiction, Monero taken, and a backup/storage VPS niche the operator actually serves rather than tolerates. Cons: one country on the map, a compact catalog without high-bandwidth unmetered ports, and no ladder beyond modest sizes — the 6.7/10 reflects a good product in a small frame. For cash-first privacy storage, FlokiNET and 1984 split the honors; for scale, neither competes with the Depot ladder.

Contabo, Hetzner, ultra.cc and RapidSeedbox — pros and cons

The bottom half of the table is where the cheap-and-easy options live, and the scoring punishes them for exactly the things their marketing omits: identity checks, absent coins, protocol-only access, or shared management. None of that makes them bad companies — it makes them wrong for private storage, which is the job this page hires for. Pros are stated plainly too, because two of the four win their niches outright.

Contabo. Pros: a Storage VPS with 1 TB SSD lands near $5.50–6.60/mo with full root and fair specs — the cheapest root-server capacity in the table. Cons: cryptocurrencies are absent from checkout entirely, cards and PayPal only; identity checks surface on part of the orders; the network leans EU-heavy; and cheap tiers ship capped ports. Three separate disqualifiers for the private-storage brief, however sharp the price looks.

Hetzner. Pros: untouchable €/TB when dumb capacity is the whole job — Storage Box spans 1 TB at €3.20 to 20 TB at €40.60/mo with traffic unmetered, plus protocol spread across SMB, SFTP, rsync, and Borg. Cons: it is protocol access, never a shell and never your stack; the account passes identity verification; payment runs card, PayPal, or SEPA; and German or Finnish law applies. The next section gives Hetzner its fair shake.

ultra.cc. Pros: a 2 TB HDD managed seedbox at €6.50 with generic crypto accepted — the desk handles the client, the updates, and the ticket queue for you. Cons: the tier is HDD rather than NVMe, management means no root access, and the accepted coins are never named on the page, which is its own answer. RapidSeedbox. Pros: a 1 TB managed seedbox at €8 with BTC taken and turnkey apps. Cons: a shared box rather than root, no Monero, and per-euro capacity that trails everything above it.

Where Hetzner is genuinely better

Honesty means printing the three best numbers in this comparison even though they sit on a rival's invoice: €3.20 buys 1 TB, €40.60 buys 20 TB, and traffic never meters. That is roughly a fifth of any root-server equivalent per terabyte — €3.20 for 1 TB is the table's best pure-storage rate by a factor of five — and Hetzner's snapshot scheduling is genuinely good. At the 20 TB tier the rate works out near €2 per terabyte, arithmetic no NVMe row on this page can print. When the data is mundane, those points are real.

Choose the Storage Box when three things hold together at once: the data is non-sensitive, access stays protocol-shaped — SMB, rsync, or Borg repositories — and an ID-verified account paid by card bothers nobody involved. Backups of public media, mirrors of open datasets, and staging archives all qualify; anything tied to your name, your clients, or your sources does not. Encrypting before upload changes the calculus somewhat, but the account identity still attaches to the bucket.

The moment one leg fails — you need root, coins, or no documents — the Storage Box exits the shortlist and the ranking above takes over. That is not a knock on Hetzner; it is the definition of the job. A protocol box behind full identity checks is a different product from a root NVMe machine behind a token, and this page exists to keep the two distinct. If EU jurisdiction is acceptable and coins are not required, row six is a rational pick for public archives. Nothing stops you from running both at once — root NVMe for the private set, the Box for the public mirror.

Decision tree: which storage provider fits

Buyers arrive at this page through six doors, in a fairly stable order, and walking them in sequence sorts the table by itself. One — private storage you control: Nextcloud, a media server, backups, a seedbox, minus KYC and plus crypto. That is the Depot ladder from $24/mo annual-eff, and it is the case the entire ranking is built around.

Two — rock-bottom per-TB disk hanging off a small VPS you already rent: BuyVM slabs, at roughly $5 per TB, win that race outright. Three — public, insensitive archives where price rules and identity is a non-issue: Hetzner's Storage Box, from €3.20/TB, is the rational pick, and nobody should pretend otherwise to win a row.

Four — Iceland-only privacy storage payable in physical cash: 1984 Hosting or FlokiNET, both of which take envelopes as well as coins. Five — a root machine with a fat disk where card payment is fine and EU presence is wanted: Contabo, eyes open about the capped ports and the ID checks on some orders. Both doors are narrow but real, and pretending they do not exist is how rankings lose credibility.

Six — all of the above plus multi-region choice, XMR, and DDoS folded into one invoice: back to the top row, which is the only place every door opens at once. If you cannot say which door you walked through, the honest default is the cheapest plan that meets the no-KYC bar — Depot 1 — and a re-read of the criteria before you spend another cent.

When NOT to pick FYRHost for storage

Two cases end with a rival's invoice, and both deserve printing on the winner's own page. First: a warm archive past roughly 10 TB where €/TB is the only metric and the data is mundane — Hetzner, or a NAS under your desk, delivers capacity at a fraction of NVMe pricing. At 10 TB, Depot-equivalent NVMe would bill roughly $112/mo annual-eff, so the archive decides whether that is a feature or a tax.

Second: you want the desk to run the client for you. ultra.cc and RapidSeedbox sell exactly that — a managed seedbox with a ticket queue — while the Depot ladder hands over root and expects you to point qBittorrent or configure the schedule yourself. A managed product is not a lesser product; it is a different division of labor, and this catalog simply does not sell it.

A third case is jurisdictional rather than commercial: if the threat model includes legal process from Germany or Finland, Hetzner leaves the shortlist too, and the remaining candidates are the Iceland and Romania rows. Matching the forum to the threat model matters more per euro than any spec sheet on this page — which is why the criteria weight checkout above capacity in the first place.

One more negative worth naming: if your storage needs are compute-shaped — transcoding, indexing, databases with hot random I/O — a Storage Depot tier is the wrong shape entirely, and the cheap VPS ladder or a Warden-class machine serves better per dollar. Bulk NVMe is for bytes at rest, and the Depot line is unapologetic about that.

Workloads that 1–5 TB NVMe carries well

Encrypted backups are the canonical job. restic and Borg both treat an SSH-accessible Depot as a first-class repository, deduplicating before anything crosses the wire, and plain rsync over a timer covers the unencrypted cases. Because the machine is root KVM, the repository is yours to encrypt, version, and prune — no provider-side key escrow exists for you to trust. Both keep checksums beside the data, so corruption surfaces at verify time rather than at restore time.

Media libraries are the second classic: Nextcloud for files and shares, Immich for photo archives that need real random I/O rather than spinning rust. NVMe makes library scans and thumbnail generation feel local, and the unmetered 2.5–10 Gbps ports mean your household of viewers does not queue behind each other on a Saturday night. Depot 2's 2 TB covers a mid-sized library; Depot 4 and up answer multi-user video without breaking a sweat.

Seedboxes and sync nodes fill the ladder's upper half: qBittorrent saturating a 10 Gbps port on Depot 4–5, or Syncthing keeping three sites mirrored, both profit from unmetered accounting — no quota invoice arrives after a heavy month, which is the classic failure mode of fair-use plans. Snapshot rollback at $9.50 is the cheap insurance underneath either role. Depot 5's 5 TB swallows a season of uploads without a cleanup cron.

One operation worth knowing end to end is the raw image: dd of a full disk to a Depot volume, encrypted before upload, is the simplest disaster-recovery story that survives a total loss of the source machine. Pair it with the DDoS-equipped rankings when the archive must stay reachable under attack, and with snapshots when it must survive you. A 1 TB Depot volume holds compressed images of every machine you care about.

Methodology: seven weighted criteria

The scoring is a weighted sum, and the weights are printed so you can disagree with them arithmetic-open. Privacy and control together carry 60% because the page serves private storage; performance and price carry 25% because terabytes are commodities; locations and extras carry the remaining 15%. Every price was re-verified 2026-09-21 on the provider's public pricing page, and this pass added the two managed-seedbox rows.

A criterion is measured, not felt. No-KYC means documents, selfie, or phone never demanded at signup per the provider's published policy; crypto means the invoice settles natively in Monero and others; root means a whole KVM machine to format and mount; performance means NVMe versus HDD, port speed, and unmetered accounting; price means the real 1 TB monthly cost and how it scales beyond.

The score column is editorial, the lineup is not for sale, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on the page. Weights move only when the workload does — a ranking for public archives would invert them and crown Hetzner, which is precisely why this page states its bias in numbers instead of adjectives. Refreshes happen whenever a provider moves on price or policy.

One omission is deliberate: no durability percentages, no uptime theater. The platform SLA is printed at 99.95%, and it applies to the Storage line the same as VPS — a number you can hold against an invoice rather than a vibe to admire from the sidelines of an outage thread.