WeBuzo is a company which talks about all the features and aspects (privacy, anonymity etc.) that we as users seek in an offshore hosting company. Those features are what we will test throughout this WeBuzo review and present for transparent audit out here.
Multiple instances on the site were found stating user-anonymity, privacy, flexible ToS, ignoring of DMCA and so on hence from the look of it the company does deserve a glimpse.
Note that this review isn’t sponsored, neither were we offered any benefit; financial or otherwise hence it’s as honest, transparent and criticizing (where apt) as possible.
We also make sure all the data and research claimed or presented throughout this WeBuzo review is transparent and can be verified by you folks independently.
WeBuzo Overview
Let’s get started on this WeBuzo review with an overview of the company, a sneak-peek into the features its provides helping you form an idea of its potential-
- Primary URL: http://www.webuzo.net/
- Servers in: Bulgaria (Europe).
- Payment methods: Cryptocurrencies+ Fiats
- Cheapest Plan: EUR 14.95/month.
- Servers: VPS/VDS/Adult.
- DMCA Compliant: No
- Content not allowed: Listed in the AUP sections.
- Uptime: 99.9% (Guaranteed).
Offshore Location
The company’s homepage mentions “Best Offshore Hosting”, “Offshore hosting” and other similar keywords at multiple instances, however the site only mentions “Europe” for most of the part on the website.
It’s only in their Terms of Services where the country of their registration is mentioned as Bulgaria; which is a country in the Balkans (a region in Europe).
In a nutshell, as will be clear in the AUP section (Acceptable Use Policy) it’s because the company is based off Bulgaria that it can offer the kind of liberty with content and user-anonymity as it does.
Anonymity
One of the prime reasons people go with Offshore hosting companies is that they wish to remain anonymous, which may just be a general way of being or a requirement in line with the content which they wish to upload, which may either be illegal or highly controversial.
The two aspects we consider when it comes to anonymity with an offshore hosting company is, Registration and Payments the two checkpoints which can be traced back to the real life of users.
As for registration, even though the company claims to offer “Anonymous offshore hosting” multiple times it does seem to require True or Real names and other data about its users, as is clear from the following line in their T&C-
Payments however can be made anonymously using CryptoCurrencies, fiats too are accepted but as will is explained in the Payment Methods section of this WeBuzo review; Crypto clearly is the preferred mode of payment for the company.
It however offers “Zero Logs” and “No Monitoring” policies which means it won’t monitor what you do with your server or keep logs about your actions.
Speed
After we’ve gone though the location of the company; and the anonymity it offers we believe Speed without doubt plays the most important part, don’t you?
Here’s an infographic from NeilPatel.com illustrating how fast users are to abandon a site based on its load-time.
Speed effects the time-on-site, bounce-rate, piggybacking, and even SERP rankings. To establish the speed WeBuzo offers its users we ran a speed test on the site’s homepage – http://www.webuzo.net/ .
Here are the page load-time test results from various continents and regions on the planet for the site:
- Europe-Germany-Frankfurt: 751ms. (Verify here – https://tools.pingdom.com/#5a32ca0180800000 ).
- Europe-UK-London: 923ms. (Verify here – https://tools.pingdom.com/#5a32ccd4c2c00000).
- North America- USA- San Francisco: 3.08seconds. (Verify here- https://tools.pingdom.com/#5a32cdea08c00000).
- Asia-Japan-Tokyo: 6.08seconds. (Verify here – https://tools.pingdom.com/#5a32cda977400000)
Bottom-line, it’s fastest for European regions as is expected and the speed is nothing short of impressive with a load time of 751ms and 923ms for Germany and London respectively.
Server Response Time
The server response time directly effects the load-time which we just recorded, this is the time required by the server to respond to the browser’s request to load the website.
Hence, if this first response takes longer the overall load-time of the website too slows down.
Also, the load-time of the website reflects the time required to load up the complete webpage, which consists of the text, images, and background scripts. The Server Response Time however records the time to first-byte (among other aspects).
This is why the load-time of websites may differ widely as every webpage has a different set of content, images, scripts and overall size, the SRT however isn’t so diverse for two websites hosted on the same server, tested from the same location.
As the test above proves (verify – https://www.bitcatcha.com/my-report/?r=MTI0NjY2MTE%3D) the response time too is impressive requiring only 105ms for London and US.
However as also was seen with the load-time results, the server only seems fast-enough with some specific locations (closer to Europe) for distanced locations the speed pretty much nose-dives.
Real-Time Traffic-Spike Analysis
This is another test we do for all our hosting reviews which deals with testing the server’s response time when there’s a traffic-spike on the website.
So we sent around 25 Virtual Users to the site, kept the users online for 3 minutes or so and then recorded the response-time required by the site.
This is the test result we obtained for WeBuzo.net (Verify here):
The blue line in the graph denotes the server response time, and the green lines the number of VUs active on the site.
The response time we recorded with 1 VU active on the site was just 86ms, and even with 25 VUs active the response time didn’t fluctuate and stayed constant at 87ms indicating traffic-load won’t effect the site’s performance as far as WeBuzo servers are concerned.
Acceptable Use Policy(AUP)
This is one of the most important points which influences my decisions when it comes to choosing an offshore anonymous hosting company, the content which is or isn’t allowed on the servers.
For starters, WeBuzo is a company which ignores DMCA complaints as the following list of its features hint:
Note that this doesn’t mean it allows hosting copyrighted material, as the following clause in its T&C clearly states-
Hence, it only ignores the “complaints” for copyrighted content, if the complaining party can get a court-order from the Bulgarian court the material will be very well removed, or may even lead to legal complications.
It also is one of the few companies which allows hosting (legal) Adult content, Gambling content, video streaming as well as Peer to Peer services such as Tor!
List of content which isn’t allowed includes Child Porn, Terrorism, Hacking, Phishing, Scam etc. Anything which is illegal under the Bulgarian, or common law is unacceptable.
Security and Uptime
Like any other plausible anonymous offshore hosting company, they too have a handful of security features up their sleeves, which include a 500GBPS anti-DDoS protection and SSD RAID 10 storage for data safety.
They also do not monitor user accounts, or peep into their private details. 99.9% uptime is guaranteed as well; if and when the downtime exceeds 0.1% of the total time (excluding scheduled downtime for maintenance and other issues) they offer pro-rated credits for the inconvenience.
Pricing Plans and Packages
WeBuzo is a VPS and VDS only company, and doesn’t offer shared servers. Although it also offers Adult /Streaming servers.
VPS plans start from USD $14.95 and go upto USD $78.99/month. All of these servers allow adult content as well as streaming, the bandwidth on all of these is fixed at 100 Mbps, although the RAM varies from 1 GB to 6 GB among other differences.
VDS plans have a starting price of USD 18.90/month and go all the way upto USD $92.90/month.
The pricing plans for the offshore adult hosting servers too are exactly alike the VDS plans.
Payment Methods and Refunds
The payment methods play a huge role when it comes to user anonymity, keeping that in mind WeBuzo has integrated payments using CryptoCurrencies, the accepted coins are:
- Bitcoin
- zCash
- Litecoin.
Fiat payments can be made using PayPal. The company is open to other options such as Wire Transfers although they have to be arranged by manually E-mailing the team.
They have a 3-day refund period although it’s paid only to users who paid using PayPal and didn’t violate any ToS clauses during those 3 days.
Comparison
After going through all the individual features that the company offers, we finally compare the most vital features that WeBuzo offers with some of the best companies we’ve ever been with getting us a broader idea of the industry standards:
Final Words
So that’s all I had to pour in as far as this WeBuzo review goes folks. We’ve talked about its anonymity, speed, security, response time, AUP, locations and everything else which we think we ought to take notice of before going with any such company.
As far as my personal opinion goes, it’s acceptable as far as its speed or AUP is concerned, however it could offer couple more server locations than just one.
However that’s just my opinion, do drop your two cents on the company as well as this WeBuzo review.
