Today we’re speaking with Andrew, the CTO of AVS ISP, an Albanian-based community provider we’ve featured several times before.  They’re a neat husband-and-wife team who’s brought some great offers to our community.

And today is no exception!

• Use promo code RAINDOG50 = One-Time 50% Discount for New Customers Only (must have no existing order)
• Or code RAINDOG25 = 25% Off Recurring Discount – Valid for Existing Customers on New Orders
• [ORDER in Albania] [ORDER in London]

In addition, anyone who uses these codes and purchases a yearly plan will get 1 month extra for free at setup!

Some further bonuses:

On our London Node, anyone using these codes will get their first IPv4 address for free at setup (in addition to the discount and 1 month free if they purchase yearly). That is in addition to any IPs they purchase at checkout and applies also to those that do not purchase IPs and take the IPv6 only.

Also – we are no longer offering package deals at this time. We are moving to a Build Your Own model – take as little or much as you’d like. It seems more efficient for everyone. We’ve had people in PMs, emails, tickets, etc asking “Can I do like London and make my own? I don ‘t need all those specs Albanian one has but I want on in Albania.” So – there it is – everything is Build-Your-Own now. (Existing clients are not effected. They keep their current packages.)

Another change we’ve made is the move to LEK (our local currency). The problem with having USD is that everytime a certain president opens his mount, the next word being “tariffs”, the Dollar crashes while our own currency is EXTREMELY stable – to the point the Central Bank is buying Euro and Dollar just to intentionally deflate the currency to keep it at close-to 100 to 1 as we run a budget surplus here. As you can imagine, it’s entirely unsustainable for us to continue using dollar when from one day to the next, we can lose 20-30% of our income on conversion rate fluctuations because a single person chose to speak publicly or post a tweet. Hopefully everyone understands this – it isn’t being done to hurt anyone or take more from anyone – and this isn’t meant to be political, however it may seem (just how it effects us) – it’s done to maintain stability for ourselves as we live here in Albania, spend in LEK, and need to pay our bills in LEK.

Now let’s do a deep dive with Andrew!

Q: As I understand it, AVS ISP is a partnership between an American man and an Albanian wife. So let’s start there. What’s your story? How did you two meet?

I was already living in Europe as a digital nomad. When my visa-free time in the Schengen Area ended, I spent some time in the UK and Ireland
(which allow 6 months visa-free for Americans). Once that was up, someone I met told me about Albania—which, at the time, offered a full year visa-free to Americans. So, I packed up my car and drove down.

It was love at first sight. Albania is one of the most amazing countries in Europe. You can be in the capital city, full of life, then drive 10 minutes to the beach and sip a margarita, or 10 minutes the other way to reach stunning mountains that look like Switzerland. Drive a little farther and you’ll find desert-like terrain and beautiful countryside—all incredibly close together. It fit perfectly with my adventurous, constantly-on-the-move lifestyle. I could stay in one place while still feeling like I was in many.

That’s how I first ended up in Albania. As for how I met my wife—that started a few years later. I’d been living in Albania for a while, following the visa rules and doing regular “visa runs” for three months out of the country. After one such trip through Serbia and Kosovo, I returned and decided I wanted to settle down and build a life here.

Enter a certain dating app. After two years of back and forth, I met her family. In Albanian culture, once you meet the family, a proposal is basically expected—so you don’t meet them until you’re ready to marry. We’ve been married several years now, and it was the best decision of my life.

Q: How do you divide up roles in the company?

Anisia has a background in Banking and Finance, with a minor in Business Administration. I come from an IT background—computer repair,
networking, server administration. So naturally, we each bring what the other lacks.

She handles the finances, planning, and business strategy—things like “How many resources does this server have? How many clients can we put on it? What’s the cost? What should we charge to make a margin?” She’s learning more of the tech side, too. I’ve taught her database
administration, support ticket handling, and more. Every day she gets deeper into the technical operations.

As for me, I handle all the infrastructure—setting up servers, networking, BGP, routing, fixing issues inside VMs, and keeping things running smoothly.

Q: What is your IT background? Why did you go into hosting?

I’ve been in IT for as long as I can remember. My first experience was breaking a Windows 95 “Barbie” computer that belonged to my sister. My
parents said, “Fix it or face the consequences,” so I spent days troubleshooting—and eventually fixed it. I was about six or seven years old.

This was in the early days of home computing—before you could just Google a fix. I found help through IRC and communities of “hacker” types (hacker in the original sense, not malicious). I was hooked. My family didn’t have much money, so I started collecting old computers people
were throwing away and building my own. That led to my first machine running black-and-white Macintosh OS, and later to Linux.

Linux changed everything. I could build my own tools, learn to program, and access the internet more freely. I eventually dropped out of high
school to do freelance web development and computer repair full time, using Craigslist to find clients. That led to my need for hosting—and my
interest in server admin and web hosting was born.

I did eventually get a GED and a degree in IT, but I’ve rarely needed them.

In 2011, I launched my first major project: Geocode.Farm—a geocoding service to help a client who didn’t want to rely on Google or Bing. It
grew into a full business, earning enough to support me. That’s when I started traveling and, eventually, ended up in Albania.  As Geocode.Farm scaled globally, I needed Anycast. GeoDNS didn’t cut it, so I dove into BGP. After years of trial and error, I became very proficient at BGP routing.

Then COVID hit. Many clients shut down or moved to in-house, open-source solutions (some of which we had helped create). Our income dropped
dramatically. I tried to find work in Albania, but the market isn’t very foreigner-friendly.

Thankfully, through BGP communities and Discord groups, AVS ISP was born. We already had some hardware from my hobby days. We repurposed it, colocated in a datacenter, and launched the business with everything paid a year in advance out of pocket. Now we’re working to grow
sustainably, using my technical experience and Anisia’s business knowledge.

Q: How is the IT environment in Albania?

It’s a mixed bag. On one hand, you have the legacy ISPs—big players who’ve been around for decades and don’t want to cooperate unless it
benefits them. Then you have the younger generation, often in university, doing great work in robotics and software. Most of them aim to leave the country for better-paying markets abroad.

And then there’s a handful of people like us—AVS ISP, Host.al, and a few others—who are trying to build something local. It’s tough. One example:
there’s a provider here that controls exclusive access to Cogent and refuses to cross-connect it to others. The national IXP is very small and dominated by the legacy ISPs who only peer with each other.

So, most of us newer companies end up tunneling traffic through nearby countries. Even the big Albanian ISPs don’t have Tier 1 transit locally—they lease lines to Montenegro, Hungary, or Bulgaria.

There’s a lot of potential in Albania, but the tech scene still has a long way to go.

Q: 99% of our readers have probably never visited Albania. How would you compare it to the USA?

It feels a lot more free. It reminds me of what the U.S. used to be—before the patchwork of contradictory laws and hyperregulation.

For example, public drinking isn’t criminalized here. You can walk around with a beer, even drive with a passenger drinking one—just don’t
drink it yourself. Disputes between neighbors? Handled privately unless it escalates. Speeding a bit? No one’s pulling you over to threaten you.

To me, it feels like California’s weather, Colorado’s mountains, Tennessee’s countryside—plus more personal freedom.

Q: You made a splash with the super-limited, lifetime offers. How has the LowEnd community worked out for you?

The response has been great. I saw the article you posted warning about lifetime deals—and interestingly, one of the guys mentioned in it was
our very first lifetime customer! He reached out to us and was incredibly kind. After being burned by previous hosts, I think it was a relief for him to find one he could trust.

We don’t get massive traffic from LEB—Albania isn’t exactly a top-searched category—but maybe 5% of our current users came from there, based on coupon usage. I recently started posting more on LET, and that’s helped, too.

We’ve recouped our yearly costs, but we’re not quite ready to pay for tags yet. Hopefully, after this article and our July offer, that changes!

Q: A big differentiator is that your hosting is actually in Albania. What else sets you apart?

Yes—our servers are physically in Albania, not just “geoIP.” We also own all of our hardware—no leased dedicated servers. We pay all our major costs at least a year in advance, reducing financial risk. We don’t oversell resources, and we’re not trying to get rich—just live comfortably.

Because we stay small, we can offer personal support and tailored configurations. Someone might say, “I need 2TB of HDD, 250GB SSD, 8GB RAM, 8vCPU, and Linux Mint with remote access,” and while that’s not a standard package, we’ll gladly set it up. Larger hosts often can’t accommodate that level of flexibility.

Q: What does “Anushka” mean? It’s the name of one of your nodes.

“Anushka” is a family nickname. My wife’s name is Anisia, and her dad—who grew up during the communist era with an admiration for Russia—calls her Anushka. So we named the node after her.

Q: You’re using Proxmox for hosting. That’s less common—why?

Proxmox gives us a lot of advantages: it’s open-source, uses KVM, has a robust API, and runs on Debian—which is my favorite distro.

Debian’s simplicity and low overhead are ideal. Our servers run Proxmox (which is Debian underneath), along with BIRD2 and Pathvector for BGP. We can do custom routing directly in /etc/network/interfaces. The BGP setup is efficient: direct client routing, iBGP between servers, and no extra layers needed.

The only downside to Proxmox is LXC. While it seems great—no need for special kernel modules—it lacks proper isolation. For example, with OpenVZ, htop would only show guest processes. With LXC, it leaks host /sys into the container. So while we’d love to offer lightweight containers, we currently only offer KVM. Proxmox is excellent at that.

Q: Your networking strategy favors guaranteed bandwidth over shared high burst speeds. What’s the response been?

Overall, very positive. Most applications—mail servers, web servers, etc.—don’t need more than 100Mbps. VPN users or people doing speed tests may notice the cap, but for real-world use, 100Mbps is more than enough.

Let’s break it down:

100Mbps = 6Gb/min = 360Gb/hr = 8.6TB/day = 259TB/month.

That’s far more than most people actually use.

Other hosts may offer 1Gbps but cap you at 2–15TB/month. So in practice, our model gives people more usable bandwidth, not less.

Also, fun fact—no YouTube or Netflix ads on Albanian IPs. 😉

Q: Where do you see AVS ISP going?

We want to grow, but in a very controlled, sustainable way. We don’t want to be a big, public company—we just want to keep doing what we
love, working directly with customers, and keeping it personal.

Eventually, we’d like to earn a Patreon provider tag on LET, give back to the community, and never forget where we started.

Q: What else should people know about AVS ISP?

When you sign up with AVS ISP, you’re supporting a real, family-run business that truly cares. We tailor things to your needs. Got a weird request? Just ask.

We’re not fully managed, and we’re not unmanaged—we’re something in between. We give you full control but we’re here to help when you need it. We’ve rescued broken VMs, debugged client-side issues, walked people through BGP setups—whatever it takes.

We’re experienced, responsive, and genuinely want our customers to succeed. We’re not here to push volume—we’re here to build something lasting and meaningful.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.