How to pick the country of your hosting

Because we are offering hosting in 18 countries, we are now often asked:

Which country should I pick for my hosting?…

While we cannot answer it for your case, we can give you the framework to find an answer yourself.

There are three important factors to understand today:

• everything is about speed ;
• privacy laws ;
• a country is associated with risks.

In general, our best answer is simply:

you have to pick the location which is the closest to your customers

It gets tricky for some people because their business is global. In this case your customers are everywhere in the world. In any case: a majority of your customers should come from one country in particular, and it is this country (or the closest location to that country) that you need to pick. However: since your customers are global, you need to alter your website and serve your static scripts using CDN (“Content Delivery Network”). This can only be done once by modifying some code (and it something we would do).

In terms of risks: Japan has obviously natural catastrophe risks (tsunamis, earthquakes, power outage, etc). Brazil on the other hand might have political risks. In our view the safest location in terms of risk is:

Ireland

And the most risky location is:

Japán

Regarding privacy laws: some countries do not allow data to be exported out of their jurisdiction. For example: for business in the EU it is required to be hosted in the EU (and that include backups).