What makes a record usable
Whoever you rent from, a payment record has to carry a few things to be worth anything afterwards. For a VAT invoice in the EU, Article 226 of Council Directive 2006/112/EC makes most of them mandatory, including "a sequential number, based on one or more series, which uniquely identifies the invoice":
- A sequential number. A random id will not do. Sequential numbering is what makes a set of invoices auditable, because a gap is visible.
- A date and an amount in a real currency. "0.00031 BTC" is not an expense line. The dollar value at the time of payment is.
- What was bought. Hosting services, described as such. "Deposit" on its own describes nothing.
- Who issued it. A full name and address that exist and can be looked up, and a VAT number if the seller has one.
- Something stable to retrieve it by, so you are not depending on an email you might delete.
The transaction hash is worth keeping too, as evidence attached to the record.
Why some crypto hosts do not issue one
The usual reason is that issuing sequential invoices means keeping proper books, and a small operation may not. Numbering that is auditable is also numbering that makes gaps obvious.
Whatever the reason, the effect on you is the same: a host that never issues a document never has to explain what happened to a balance, and a wallet address plus an email thread is a soft record.
How it works here
Every crypto top-up produces an invoice with a sequential number in the form NH-YYYY-NNNN: the year and a counter that does not skip, starting again each January. It carries the date, the dollar amount, the description "Prepaid hosting services: account credit", our company name, registry code and address as the seller, your account email and, where known, your country, and a payment reference that ties it to the transaction. You can download it from your profile at any time and print it to PDF; nothing depends on you having kept an email.
A card top-up is the one exception. Cards go through our payment partner, which sells that payment as merchant of record, so the receipt for it comes from them rather than from us.
We are Nocthost OÜ, registered in Estonia and VAT-registered there since 5 October 2026, so invoices from that date carry our VAT number. If you buy for a company in the EU, add its VAT ID under billing details in your profile: crypto top-ups are then invoiced to the company with 0% VAT under the reverse charge, and the invoice cites Article 196 of the VAT Directive, which makes the business customer liable for the VAT on services like these when the supplier is not established in the customer's member state.
The relationship between a top-up and a server is worth being clear about, because it trips people up at bookkeeping time:
The invoice is for the top-up. It does not cover a particular server. You are funding a prepaid balance, and that is the payment event. Servers then draw against that balance by the hour, which is usage rather than a second transaction. So a month with one $50 top-up and eleven servers produces one invoice, not eleven.
That is also why the hourly charges show up as a running ledger rather than as invoices: nothing changed hands at that moment, the balance just went down. The price list shows what each plan draws per hour, from $0.013699 on the $10/month entry plan.
The tax part, carefully
We are a hosting provider, and what follows describes what records exist. It is not tax advice.
Spending cryptocurrency on goods or services is a taxable event in a number of jurisdictions, because you disposed of an asset. The US IRS, for example, answers question 14 of its virtual currency FAQ plainly: if you pay for a service with virtual currency held as a capital asset, you "will have a capital gain or loss". What that means for you depends entirely on where you are.
The practical consequence is simply this: keep the invoice and the transaction hash together, note the dollar value at the time, and give both to whoever does your return. A host that issues you a numbered document has made that easy. A host that gave you a wallet address has not.
If your host does not issue invoices
Build the record yourself, because nobody else will:
- Screenshot or export the payment page at the moment of payment, with the amount and the date visible.
- Save the transaction hash and the dollar value at that time.
- Keep the hosting account's own ledger or usage page alongside it.
It is weaker than a numbered invoice and better than nothing. And it is a reasonable thing to weigh when choosing where to rent: what to look for in a host covers the rest of that list.