01 Before you start: define the threat
Anonymity from a casual observer, from a civil litigant and from a state adversary are three very different problems with three different budgets. Deciding which one you are solving prevents both under- and over-engineering.
02 Step 1 — connection
Sign up over Tor Browser, or over a VPN you did not buy with a card. Your signup IP is one of the few things a provider might record even when it collects nothing else.
03 Step 2 — identity
Create an email alias used for nothing else. Providers that require no verification still need somewhere to send credentials. Do not reuse an address that appears in a breach corpus alongside your name.
04 Step 3 — payment
Monero. This is the step most often done badly: paying with Bitcoin withdrawn from an identity-verified exchange links the purchase to you permanently, no matter how careful the other three steps were.
05 Step 4 — after provisioning
Generate a fresh SSH key used nowhere else. Administer over Tor or a VPN, consistently — one login from home is all it takes. Keep the server out of accounts that identify you, and register any domain with a registrar that accepts crypto.
- Fresh SSH key, never reused, never in a public repository
- Consistent administration path — no exceptions
- No personal accounts, API keys or analytics on the instance
- Strip metadata from anything you publish
- Bastion line with LUKS if data at rest matters