Why Albania Is a Strong Location for Privacy-Focused VPS Hosting
When choosing a location for VPS infrastructure, many people automatically look at large hosting hubs such as Germany, the Netherlands, or the United States. However, smaller regions can sometimes offer unique advantages.
Albania has become an interesting location for VPS hosting, especially for users who want to run their own infrastructure such as personal VPN gateways, private DNS resolvers, or encrypted networking services.
Between its regulatory environment, geographic position, and network connectivity options, Albania offers several benefits for privacy-focused hosting.
A Relatively Open Internet Environment
Albania’s internet environment remains relatively open compared with many parts of the world. VPN technology is legal, and individuals and businesses are free to deploy encrypted networking tools such as WireGuard or OpenVPN. This makes the country a practical location for hosting personal infrastructure designed to improve privacy, security, or remote access. 1
A Real-World Example: The TikTok Block
In 2025, Albania implemented a nationwide block of TikTok by ordering internet providers to restrict access to the platform. The restrictions targeted domains, DNS records, and network routes associated with the service. 2
However, infrastructure hosted with AVS ISP remained able to access the platform normally during this period. This is largely due to how our network is designed.
Rather than relying only on local routing and local ISP interconnections, AVS ISP routes traffic through multiple international upstreams and transit paths across several countries. This provides:
- More diverse global routing paths
- Better international peering options
- Reduced reliance on local filtering policies
- Improved latency for many international destinations
Because traffic is not limited to domestic Albanian network paths, attempts to block services at the local ISP level are ineffective for systems hosted on our infrastructure and our systems remain unaffected by any blocks or bans.
Routing Diversity and Global Connectivity
Another advantage of hosting infrastructure in Albania is the ability to build diverse network routing paths. Because of the large disapora population living in Europe coupled with the lack of Tier 1 providers and content providers in Albania, ISPs have found a unique way to route traffic. Many ISPs send traffic to neighboring countries, or even up into the EU, for better routes and peering. Due to how common this is, there exists large networks of direct L2 and Wave carriers connecting Albania directly to some of the largest hubs in Europe, including Italy, Bulgaria, The Netherlands, Germany, Serbia, Montengro, and even into Slovenia through Kosovo. This allows Albanian networks to directly connect and peer in some of the largest hubs in Europe - at the small cost of some "hairpin routing" (where some ISPs may have slight latency to eachother if peering in different EU countries) - which can be helped through the local IXP which is small, but suitable for reaching direct Albanian ISPs locally when needed.
AVS ISP infrastructure connects to multiple international transit providers and routes traffic across several countries before reaching global destinations. This approach helps provide:
- Better global latency in many cases
- Access to larger international peering ecosystems
- Greater resilience against regional outages
- Reduced exposure to localized filtering or routing changes
For users operating distributed services or privacy-focused infrastructure, routing diversity can be just as important as server location.
Built-In DNS Security
AVS ISP also implements security measures designed to protect the integrity of DNS resolution.
All of our VPS templates include encrypted DNS configuration with DNSSEC validation enabled by default. This provides several important benefits:
- DNS queries are encrypted between the server and the resolver
- DNSSEC validation ensures domain responses have not been modified
- DNS manipulation through traditional filtering techniques becomes significantly more difficult
This helps ensure servers receive authentic DNS responses rather than altered or intercepted ones.
Personal VPN Infrastructure
Though AVS ISP does not allow commerical VPN providers to use our services due to abuse, customers are free (and encouraged to!) to deploy their own personal VPN gateways on their VPS servers. This is commonly used for:
- Secure remote access to home or office networks
- Private browsing when using public Wi-Fi
- Secure access to self-hosted services
- Encrypted connectivity between devices
Running your own VPN infrastructure provides full control over security, configuration, and logging policies.
Supporting a More Open Internet
The internet works best when infrastructure is distributed across many independent networks and geographic locations.
Hosting services in emerging regions like Albania helps add diversity to global infrastructure and reduces reliance on a small number of centralized hosting hubs.
For developers, privacy-focused users, and system administrators, deploying infrastructure in these regions can help build networks that are more resilient, more flexible, and more resistant to censorship.