RAM-Only Servers Explained: The Physical Guarantee of a No-Logs Policy

Every privacy-focused service makes a central promise: "We don't keep logs." For most companies, this is a software promise. They configure their systems not to write your activity to a hard drive and publish a privacy policy document asking you to trust them. But a software promise can be broken. A misconfiguration, a malicious insider, or a secret court order could turn logging back on without anyone knowing.

We believe trust requires more than a promise. It requires proof. Our approach is to make logging a physical impossibility. This is the principle behind our RAM-only server infrastructure, and it's a fundamental difference in how we protect your data.

How a Normal Server Works: The Filing Cabinet

Think of a traditional server as a standard office computer. It has a hard drive or an SSD, which acts like a permanent filing cabinet. The operating system, the applications, and all the data—including connection logs, error logs, and potentially your activity—are written into this cabinet for long-term storage.

The key characteristic here is persistence. If you shut down the server and turn it back on, all that data is still there, waiting to be read. For most businesses, this is a feature. For a privacy service, it is a critical vulnerability. A persistent disk is a permanent record, and a permanent record is a liability.

The 1857 Approach: The Workbench (RAM-Only)

Now, imagine a server with no filing cabinet. No hard drive, no SSD. It only has a workbench—this is its RAM (Random Access Memory).

RAM is incredibly fast, but it is also volatile. This means it requires constant power to hold information. The moment the power is cut, everything on the workbench vanishes instantly and permanently, with no possibility of recovery.

Here’s how our RAM-only servers work:

  1. When a server boots up, the entire operating system and our application are loaded from a secure, read-only image directly into RAM.
  2. All operations—routing your traffic, handling your connection, everything—happen exclusively in this volatile memory space.
  3. No data is ever written to a persistent disk because one does not exist. The server has no physical capacity to store information long-term.

Why This is a Game-Changer for Privacy

This isn't just a technical detail; it's a paradigm shift in how trust is established.

1. It Makes a No-Logs Policy Physically Enforced.
We can’t hand over data that we don't have. More importantly, we've built a system where it's physically impossible to store that data in the first place. Our no-logs policy is not just a promise; it's an architectural certainty.

2. It Protects Against Physical Server Seizure.
One of the greatest threats to a privacy service is the physical seizure of its servers by authorities. With traditional servers, forensics teams could potentially recover data from the hard drives. If one of our RAM-only servers is seized and unplugged from its power source, any data residing in its memory is gone forever. There is nothing to recover.

3. It Ensures System-Wide Sanitation.
A scheduled or forced reboot acts as a complete sanitation of the server. Every restart wipes the slate clean, ensuring that no residual data, temporary files, or configuration fragments can accumulate over time.

Conclusion: From Policy to Physics

The difference is simple but profound. A traditional privacy service asks you to trust their policy. We ask you to trust physics.

Other services are designed to function normally and are then configured not to remember. Our servers are designed, from the hardware up, to forget. This commitment to a RAM-only infrastructure is a core part of our philosophy. It is how we transform the promise of privacy into a verifiable reality.