I used to run a blog with Godaddy hosting service until I received a DMCA takedown over a photo of a celebrity I took with my camera and my whole site was removed. When I explained to Godaddy staff and legal that the image originated from my camera and had metadata proof, their response was, "We do not care for merit of claims, we only obey DMCA, no matter what". Onward to 1984 Hosting, based in Iceland, where they do not blindly follow DMCA takedown "no matter what". That there is some additional vetting of claims instead of mindless obedience. While the price is higher than conventional providers, I got a pretty good value and could register as many domains, have as many email accounts and open as many sites as I liked. The user interface is pretty easy and when stuck, the staff helps out. All was great for several years and I told as many people as I could, to use, 1984 Hosting. There were even times when 1984 staff went out of their way to help me with some issues I struggle with as a beginner web dev. This was the early years as a client. Things became stressful (and left) when some of their staff informed me I was violating 1984 terms and conditions by hosting sites from other people. This is nothing new that staff was aware of. As a beginner web dev, and in school at the time, I was developing sites for non tech-savvy senior citizens who ran old-school camera shops or helping out bands with a website. These are small time sites with tiny traffic (100 visits a week). I was the main admin in all cases. I sent emails to the head of 1984 Hosting to explain what happened and there are indicators on the site that show how little traffic I have. I wish I had sites that brought crazy traffic, overloaded their servers and was developing/hosting Brian Eno's website. I am just a shitty dev working on being less shitty. Management responded and the warnings and threats of account termination continued. Another issue, complaints from people trying to send emails to me and they forwarded error maeesages. 1984 Staff told me that the other party configured their emails wrong and that their email hosting needs to be fixed. These are Gmail and Hotmail senders. So this means I need to ring up Google and Microsoft and explain they need to reconfigure their servers to accommodate 1984 Hosting. This was also recent. Here is what I think happened at 1984; after I signed on, they went through a growth phase and hired a bunch of people and new staff are clueless and management at 1984 Hosting have too many clients to worry about tiny little ones like me. When I went to other hosting providers, I noticed my service was much faster at the new place. At the time, 1984 was a bit slower and I left before they adopted SSD's. Maybe 1984 Hosting is better now and the newer staff has more comprehension...or not. I had good years with 1984 Hosting, but perhaps they are adopting a more stringent model to take on larger clients and little fish like me do not matter.

I've hosted with them for a few years. Before that I bounced between a few hosts, unhappy with the service, what they could offer, space etc...I've never had a problem with 1984. They've been helpful when I needed it, which wasn't very often, because of the lack of hosting problems.Also they're just a cool company. They run on principles, and you can really feel it.They're the first hosting service I've used that I can recommend without any reservations.

I can personally vouch for the ethics and underpinnings of this company. I was one of the founders of the Reykjavík GNU/Linux User's Group (RGLUG), and several years later the Icelandic Society for Digital Freedoms (FSFÍ). 1984 offered us a free VPS instance for our website, mailing list, wiki's and other digital freedom related work. I never experienced any reliability issues and if we had any questions, requests or issues, 1984 would resolve them within minutes.This is a solid company, they've been doing this for years, and they've actively supported organizations such as the ones I was involved with from day 1. I've used their FreeDNS service for years, for my several domains, and I don't recall noticing a single outage.