Founded in 2004 and backed by CH Group Corp. PanamaServer is one of the most experienced offshore hosting providers in the industry, so we put the company through a test of its features and potential throughout this PanamaServer Review.
Unlike most other reviews, we do not aim at “selling” the hosting plans to you; our sole goal here is to get our readers an honest, transparent and detailed insight of the company and its features.
PanamaServer Hosting Quick Overview
Before diving deep into this PanamaServer Review, let’s get you an overview of the company’s prime features and aspects:
- Primary URL: https://www.panamaserver.com/
- Servers Located: Panama (Offshore)
- Payment methods: Cryptocurrencies + Fiats
- Cheapest Plan: $1.66/month (Shared), $5.00/Month(VPS), $99.00/Month(Dedicated).
- Servers: Shared Hosting, VPS Server, Dedicated, Domain Name, SSL
- DMCA Compliant: Yes
- Content not allowed: Listed in the AUP section.
Buy Your Offshore Server with PanamaServer
Offshore Location and Datacenter
We’re talking about Offshore hosting companies, you see why the word has been quoted don’t you? Simply because the location would be the most vital factor when it comes to an offshore hosting company.
PanamaServer is based off Panama (wasn’t that obvious?) and Panama as is widely known is one of the least-conservative countries when it comes to digital or even financial laws.
They also do not function off third-party datacenters and have their own allocated IP network space and dedicated support staff.
Although the company only offers servers from one country, hence due to the lack of more locations the performance won’t be as impressive for visitors a bit too far from Panama. If user highly interested in only in Panama located server then this is the great hosting service provider.
Anonymity
Considering how not always is the content hosted on offshore hosting servers legal or ethical, most users on such servers like to keep their identity and privacy to themselves, don’t they?
Even though there isn’t any direct mention of the registration-data having to be true, the site doesn’t mention being anonymous or privacy-oriented either hence we can conclude registration may be anonymous by default but may demand identity proof at a later time lest such situation presents itself.
As for payment methods, it does support Cryptocurrencies among other ways to pay hence the payments front atleast can be said to be anonymous.
Speed
The speed is effected by the server configuration and resources but it also is directly impacted by the location of the servers; Panama in this case.
To keep this review as honest an unbiased as possible, we’ll test various aspects of the website speed including its page-load time, Server Response Time, as well as Server Response Time with Spiked traffic!
And not just from one location but from many making sure regardless of where you’re from you get an idea of its performance for your location!
Page Load-time
This page load-time test is about the total time taken by the website to load in its entirety, that includes the HTML, Images, Javascript (and other scripts) and so on.
- Test Website: https://www.panamaserver.com/
- South America- Brazil- Sao Paulo: 4.37seconds.(Verify)
- Asia – Japan- Tokyo: 6.33seconds. (Verify)
- Europe-Germany-Frankfurt: 6.04sconds. (Verify)
- North America- USA- San Francisco: 4.59seconds (Verify)
- Pacific-Australia-Sydney: 7.89seconds (Verify here)
As for the test-site https://www.panamaserver.com/, we checked first hand making sure it was hosted on PanamaServer itself and not on other server so the results can be relied upon; its nameservers can be verified here.
The results do prove that the loading time of the test-site is completely unacceptable and extremely slow, for almost all the locations tested!
Note that these results aren’t universal, and will differ for each site even for sites on the same server considering how each site will have different contents and images, scripts, optimization etc.
Considering how this test was very individualistic and site-specific; maybe the site isn’t properly coded or optimized? So we conduct another, more universal test which should clear things a bit.
Server Response Time
Unlike the page load-time which is an overall load-time result for any specific website, the Server Response Time tests the time required to load the HTML of a website, the HTML tells the client what other resources (scripts, images etc.) are needed for the complete site to be loaded.
In other words, this is the time needed by the server to respond to a client’s initial request to load a site. The delayed this response time is, the slower will the site load-time be in general and vice-versa.
Here are the test results for Panamaserver.com (Verify here):
As is now evident, the company servers aren’t all that bad; infact the response times are pretty Impressive, atleast for USA (94ms), Sydney (270ms) and most other locations.
Hence the load-time test results above can be chucked to the site’s bad coding and optimization, and it can be safely assumed if you optimize your site properly the server itself won’t slow your sites down on PanamaServer.
Traffic-Spike Analysis
The last of the tests related to the server’s speed for this PanamaServer Review is a Traffic-spike analysis.
We like to be through, and we know for a fact that traffic-spike on any server majorly effects its response time as more resources are used up and the server reaches closer to its capacity.
So, we send anywhere between 25-100 Virtual Users to the test-site, and then record its server response time throughout to see if it fluctuates, and if so how.
As the snap above illustrates, the response time does fluctuate quite a bit, it’s almost like a mountain with constant ups and downs throughout the 3-minute duration of the test (Verify result here).
What’s noteworthy is, the highest response time needed by the server was 94ms with 1VU active, while the least was 0ms at multiple points, even with 24VUs active it only needed 14ms of time.
So it can be concluded that, despite the fluctuations the response time doesn’t skyrocket and is still impressive in the even of a traffic-spike.
Bottomline, combining all three tests that we made the server go through in this PanamaServer review, in my personal opinion the server performs quite well in most scenarios and for most locations (unless the site is coded poorly which isn’t the server’s fault).
Pricing Plans and Packages
The company having the kind of experience that it does in the industry, offers all the commonly bought servers, including Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting Server as well as Dedicated Server.
Shared Servers start as low as USD $1.99/month, armed with cPanel, 3-months of free SSL certificate and free website creator. Other plans are available for USD 4.00/month and USD $12.50/month. The price difference is based on the storage space, bandwidth allocated and other features. PanamaServer offers two different platform shared hosting service that are cPanel and Plesk.
As for VPS, it offers both OpenVZ and KVM VPS, although Windows VPS seems to be absent.
OpenVZ VPS starts at USD $5.00/month, while KVM at USD $30.00/month. Higher plans can be availed according to the features, which are completely customizable by the customer.
And finally, Dedicated servers too are of two types, Bare Metal or Cloud. Bare Metal Dedicated servers start at USD $99.00/month and go upto USD $350.00/month; Cloud ones can only be ordered by manually contacting the team.
Buy Your Offshore Server with PanamaServer
Payment Methods
As a customer I’d like to know which methods or processors I can use to make payment to company, wouldn’t you?
Being offshore, fortunately the company does allow Bitcoin which keeps user anonymity intact to some extent.
Apart from that, it also accepts fiat payments via PayPal, Credit/Debit cards, WebMoney and Western Union.
Are you a kind of Guy? who matter privacy and anonymity on the first place. At the time of new account creation, you must need to register your account with the help of fake information and anyone anonymous or disposable email address. and You can pay hosting fee with the help of Bitcoin.
Acceptable Use Policy
If there’s one aspect which holds as much importance as the “location” of the company while choosing an offshore hosting company, it’s the AUP, isn’t it? This is what lists what you can or can’t upload to the site!
They have listed the following content as not allowed in their T&C-
- Any kind of porn.
- Copyrighted material/Warez
- Anything illegal under Federal/State or Panamanian law.
Anything else which may be objectionable and not listed in this list or their T&C is left completely at the discretion of the company to be allowed or not when discovered.
Support
The last section we’d have a glimpse of before taking your leave off this PanamaServer Review is its support.
They do provide quite a few ways to contact them, methods as traditional as E-mails, as easy as Phone as well as modern as Whatsapp are available.
They even accept physical visits at their office during office-hours. The response-time for our test-email was around 8hours which I’d say isn’t that bad.
Final Words
So that’s us signing off this Panama Review folks, is the company worth it? Does it deserve your time, money and content? Those are decisions I’ll leave up to you educated folks.
Although let me pour in my two cents, the only flaws I found was that of locations and the AUP, as only Panamanian servers are provided and the AUP doesn’t allow copyrighted content and respects DMCA.
if your website has content, where you need to bypass DMCA content restriction then you need to choose DMCA Ignore based hosting services. My recommendation are Bulletproof Hosting and WebCare360 Hosting.
Buy Your Offshore Server with PanamaServer
Apart from that, the performance of the server was acceptable. But hey that’s just what we think, may not coincide with your thoughts, hence do drop your opinion both about the company as well as this PanamaServer review in the comments.
