How does Basalthold prepare, price and support a rented storage server?

What does the person preparing my hold do?

Nothing is provisioned by a script alone: a team member sets up each machine once your payment is confirmed. A person on the team prepares the machine after your payment is confirmed, within 72 hours, so it is not instant; the dashboard shows its progress until the IP address appears.

• System disk: the system you picked goes on its own SSD. Choices: Debian 13, Debian 12, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, AlmaLinux 10, Rocky Linux 10, Proxmox VE 9 and Proxmox Backup Server 4.
• Data drives: they stay blank and unpartitioned, ready for ZFS, mdadm or single disks.
• An array before handover: ask support for RAID 6 or RAID 10 while the server is still being prepared. After handover, the layout is yours to build.
• Login: your public key is installed for root, or a temporary root password is set when you gave no key.
• After delivery: Reboots, reinstalls and cancellations are requested in the dashboard and handled by the team; a reinstall wipes every drive, data drives included.

If you plan ZFS, leave the drives blank: ZFS wants whole disks, not a controller's virtual volume. ZFS or hardware RAID explains why, and RAID 6 or RAID 10 compares the two arrays we can prepare.

How was the price survey run?

The survey read public order pages only, on 2 November 2026. We opened no account, started no checkout and contacted no seller. It counts 23 sellers that list a priced physical server with at least 16 TB of hard drives.

• Currency: 1 EUR = 1.1172 USD (ECB, 2026-10-30). No other rate is used.
• Setup fees: a one-off fee is spread over twelve months and added to the monthly price.
• References kept apart: Hetzner Storage Box, Backblaze B2, Wasabi and BuyVM's storage slabs give price-per-TB context. They never set our price.
• Payment processors: hosts that take crypto through Cryptomus or Heleket were flagged, because the United Kingdom designated that processor on 8 October 2026. None of them set a reference price.

Of 23 sellers read on 2 November 2026, 16 take crypto. Across all 23, 2 demand ID before delivery, 12 may ask for it on a trigger, and only 3 say they never do.

How are comparable servers chosen?

A comparable server must pass two sets of rules, and the one with the smallest monthly price sets the reference.

• The host accepts crypto, asks for no ID at signup, is not on a sanctions list and is not one of the reference products.
• The plan is a physical server with an IPv4 address, billed monthly and shown in stock. It needs a 1 Gbit/s port or faster, 10 TB of traffic or more and a stated core count.
• The capacity is at least the hold's raw hard-drive total, counted as sold, before any RAID.
• Cores and memory must reach a floor set for each hold.

The hold's price is then 75% of that reference, rounded down to the cent; the named reference of each hold is in the table below and on the pricing page. We do not claim to be the cheapest at every capacity: sellers outside the pool list less per TB, down to $1.30 at NetDynamics24.

Why is the processor's age not counted?

Because the storage market runs on older processors, and a storage server rarely waits on its CPU. With a rule of processors from 2018 or later, only 2 hosts and 3 plans qualified. That rule alone removed 10 of 13 plans that passed every other test. No plan of 36 TB or more would have been left to compare.

A 1 Gbit/s link tops out at 125 MB per second, which an older Xeon handles. Checksums, compression and encryption do use CPU; our holds carry Intel Xeon E-2176G, AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Intel Xeon Silver 4210R and AMD EPYC 7302P.

What happens when a drive fails?

When a drive fails, open a ticket: the team has it replaced at no cost, and rebuilding the array on the new drive is up to your setup.

With parity, the server keeps serving while a drive is missing: RAIDZ2 and RAID 6 survive two failures. Without parity, the data on the dead drive is gone. Watch the drives yourself with smartctl -a and zpool status, and write to support when one degrades. Include its serial number, the server's IP address and the output of those commands.

The rebuild then runs on your machine, at your pace. Large drives take a long time to resilver; how long a RAID 6 or RAIDZ2 rebuild takes shows the arithmetic.

How does support work?

Support is email to [email protected], in English. A person answers support emails within 12 hours, seven days a week, including help with SSH keys, RAID, reinstalls and firewall rules.

• Reboots and reinstalls: request them in the dashboard. There is no IPMI or KVM-over-IP access for customers; reboots and reinstalls you request in the dashboard are carried out by the team.
• Abuse reports: they go to [email protected], a separate inbox.
• Your secrets: Nobody from our team will ever ask for your account number, your root password or your private SSH key, by email or in a chat.

What to put in a ticket is on how to contact Basalthold.

What do we keep, and how is billing done?

No logs are kept: no connection records, no traffic records and no visitor or customer IP addresses, on the website, in the dashboard or on the servers. The few records billing needs are listed one by one in the privacy policy.

Billing runs from a prepaid crypto balance: BTC, USDT, USDC, ETH, SOL, LTC, from $25. Each server is paid in advance from your crypto balance, for 30 days, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months as chosen at checkout. Auto-renew charges the same length again at the price you started with, unless you set another length for the next renewal in the dashboard; when the balance falls short, the server stops at the end of its term, its drives are held for 7 days and then wiped. Credits for days lost to a fault follow the refund policy, and the holds with their terms are on the pricing page.