Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- For privacy: Monero. For speed: Lightning. For familiarity: Bitcoin on-chain.
- Paying on-chain costs $1-5 in miner fees depending on network congestion.
- Lightning payments confirm in seconds and cost fractions of a cent.
- Monero is the only major coin untraceable on-chain by default.
- Avoid Coinbase Commerce and BitPay — they take 1-2% and do chain-analysis on you.
Which Coin Should You Use?
| Coin | Best For | Confirmation | Fees | Privacy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (on-chain) | Large annual prepays | 10-60 min | $1-5 | Pseudonymous (on-chain traceable) |
| Lightning | Monthly payments | Seconds | <$0.01 | Off-chain, hard to trace |
| Monero | Privacy-sensitive | 2-10 min | $0.01-0.10 | Untraceable by design |
If you're paying $6/month for Growth hosting, Lightning makes the most sense — fast confirmation, almost zero fees. If you're paying $144 for 2 years upfront, Bitcoin on-chain is fine. If you're paying for a site where you don't want the payment traceable back to you, Monero.
Paying With Bitcoin (On-Chain)
- Choose Bitcoin at checkout. You'll see a payment request with an amount in BTC and a QR code.
- Scan the QR with any Bitcoin wallet (BlueWallet, Muun, Electrum, hardware wallet). Confirm the amount.
- Broadcast. The transaction hits the mempool in seconds.
- Wait for 1 confirmation (~10 min average, sometimes faster). At 1 confirmation your order activates.
Fees: You pay a miner fee, not us. During quiet periods $1-2. During congestion (rare in 2026 post-Runes) $3-5. Your wallet picks the fee automatically.
Privacy: Anyone can see the transaction on a block explorer. If you bought the BTC on a KYC exchange and sent it directly, the exchange knows you paid us. Use coinjoin (Samourai, Wasabi) or route through Lightning to break the chain.
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See Hosting PlansPaying With Lightning
Lightning is Bitcoin's layer-2 payment network — instant, cheap, and harder to trace than on-chain BTC.
- Choose Lightning at checkout. You'll get a BOLT11 invoice (long string starting with
lnbc...) plus a QR code. - Pay from a Lightning wallet — Phoenix, Breez, Wallet of Satoshi, BlueWallet, or a self-hosted node.
- Payment confirms in 1-5 seconds. Your hosting activates immediately.
Fees: Usually under a cent. Wallet of Satoshi has zero fees up to certain thresholds.
Privacy: Lightning payments are "onion-routed" through the network — intermediate nodes see an amount and a next-hop but not sender/receiver. Privacy is much better than on-chain BTC but not as strong as Monero.
Gotcha: Custodial Lightning wallets (Wallet of Satoshi) are easy but know your identity. Non-custodial wallets (Phoenix, Breez) preserve privacy better.
Paying With Monero
Monero is the privacy option. Ring signatures, stealth addresses, and confidential transactions make the blockchain effectively opaque.
- Choose Monero at checkout. You get a payment URI and QR.
- Pay from any Monero wallet — the official GUI/CLI, Feather, Cake Wallet, Monerujo (Android).
- Wait for 10 confirmations (default for merchant safety; ~20 minutes). Your hosting activates after confirmation.
Fees: ~$0.01-0.10 depending on network load.
Privacy: On-chain, nobody can see the sender, receiver, or amount. Your privacy depends on how you acquired the XMR — atomic swaps from BTC, P2P via Haveno, or LocalMonero-style marketplaces preserve it. KYC exchanges (Kraken until delisting) break it.
Why Real Hosts Use BTCPay Server
Coinbase Commerce and BitPay dominate "accept crypto" integrations. Problem: they take 1-2% and do chain analysis on every payment. BitPay has refused payments from legitimate users whose funds touched addresses they flagged.
BTCPay Server is self-hosted open-source software that processes Bitcoin and Lightning directly, no middleman, no fees, no chain analysis, no chargebacks. We run our own BTCPay instance and accept BTC, LN, and XMR through it.
Why this matters for you: the 1-2% Coinbase/BitPay fee has to come from somewhere. Hosts who use them charge slightly more or cap crypto payments at certain plans. We don't charge extra for crypto because our cost is actually lower than card processing.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Our crypto checkout only asks for an email address (where to send your hosting details) and the payment itself. No name, no address, no KYC. This is by design.
BTCPay locks the fiat-equivalent amount at invoice creation and holds for 15 minutes. If the price moves within that window, the invoice still settles at the locked amount. If you miss the window, a new invoice is generated at the new rate.
Not currently. Stablecoins on Ethereum have high fees and require trusting a centralized issuer. We may add USDT on Lightning (RGB / Taproot Assets) when that matures.
For BTC and Lightning, send the exact invoice amount — wallets do this automatically. For Monero, if the amount differs, the payment is still credited manually; open a support ticket with the tx ID and we'll reconcile.
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See Hosting PlansRelated tools, articles & authoritative sources
Hand-picked internal pages and external references from sources Google itself considers authoritative on this topic.
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