Bitcoin that settles in seconds
On-chain Bitcoin is secure but slow and, at busy times, expensive — you wait for block confirmations and pay a fee sized for the whole network. That is fine for a yearly prepayment; it is painful for a two-dollar hourly charge. The Lightning Network fixes exactly that case.
Lightning is a second layer on top of Bitcoin. Instead of broadcasting every payment to the blockchain, participants open payment channels and route funds through them off-chain. Only opening and closing a channel touch the main ledger. Between those events, payments hop from node to node almost instantly, with fees counted in satoshis. It is the same bitcoin, moved a faster way.
Lightning payments are processed by OxaPay, a payment processor — the same rail that handles our on-chain Bitcoin checkout. Self-hosted BTCPay Server with our own node — removing the intermediary — is on our roadmap.
Why Lightning fits VPS billing
- Hourly billing that actually adds up. A metered server might accrue a few cents an hour. On-chain that is uneconomical; over Lightning the fee is negligible, so pay-as-you-go stops being a rounding error problem.
- Prepaid top-ups. Keep a small balance on your order and top it up in seconds whenever it runs low, from a phone wallet, without waiting on blocks.
- Fast provisioning. Because an invoice settles in seconds, the provisioning webhook fires almost immediately after you scan and pay — less waiting between order and root shell.
How to pay over Lightning
You need a Lightning-capable wallet. Custodial options like Wallet of Satoshi or Breez are the simplest; self-custodial choices include Phoenix, Zeus, or your own node running LND or Core Lightning. A plain on-chain Bitcoin wallet will not work — it cannot pay a Lightning invoice.
- Choose a plan and get your order ID. As with every coin, checkout returns a 32-character token that is your account for the order. No email is required; a disposable one is optional.
- Select Lightning at checkout. We show a
lnbc…invoice string and a QR code. The.onioncheckout renders it without JavaScript. - Scan and confirm. Open your Lightning wallet, scan the QR, and approve. Settlement is typically a few seconds.
- Watch the expiry. Lightning invoices are short-lived by design — they lock a specific amount and route. If the timer runs out before you pay, reload the page for a fresh invoice. You are never charged for an expired one.
# A Lightning invoice looks like this (truncated):
lnbc21500n1p… <bech32 payment request>
# Decode it in your wallet or with a node:
lncli decodepayreq lnbc21500n1p…Save your 32-character order ID. Because we hold no email or name, that token is how you — and only you — prove the order is yours later.
When to use on-chain instead
Lightning is built for small and medium amounts. A single payment is bounded by the capacity of the channels it routes through, so a large annual prepayment can exceed what Lightning will carry in one shot. When that happens, pay the same order on-chain in Bitcoin — see the Bitcoin VPS page. Both rails are processed by OxaPay, a payment processor, so switching between them does not change your order or your ID.
What Lightning does and doesn’t give you
Lightning buys you speed and low fees, not stronger on-chain privacy. Channel routing can expose metadata, and the underlying bitcoin is still Bitcoin — a public, traceable ledger. If unlinkability from your identity is the priority, pay in Monero, our first-class privacy rail. Whatever coin you choose, we require no email and log nothing beyond what the no-logs policy states.
Prices shown across the site are illustrative and labelled pre-launch; final Lightning fee handling and minimum top-up amounts are set at launch — small minimums and low fees apply. Whatever you run on the server still has to follow our Acceptable Use Policy — we are a privacy host with a real AUP and an abuse desk, not a bulletproof host.