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by adventured 2794 days ago
That heavily depends on where you're operating from. Ignoring the latency problems of using Hetzner et al. for a moment (if you're based on the US). Increasingly as the Internet fractures down lines of very distinctly separate legal structures nation to nation (or region to region), Hetzner, OVH and Scaleway are not going to be viable choices for most organizations in the US. Particularly as it pertains to production environments and until or unless they get proper US facilities.

If I physically operate in the US and I base my servers in the EU, then I open myself up to not only US but also EU jurisdiction and compliance in a myriad of ways. It's an entirely unnecesary additional burden in exchange for a discount on infrastructure (which is rarely the biggest cost in anything these days).

I have no intention of ever complying with GDPR for example, unless I'm running a very large organization. Not because I disagree with most of GDPR, rather, because I'm going to comply with US laws, as that's my legal jurisdiction and those are the laws I'm governed by.

Hosting with Scaleway, OVH or Hetzner is a big jurisdiction mistake in most cases for smaller US organizations, just as it would be to arbitrarily host in Japan or China or Brazil (ie foreign locales with entirely different laws).

2 comments

...being physically in the EU, but building stuff that has the potential to have 80% of the customers in US, as long as traffic to end-users in US is good (it usually is unless you care about low latency for gaming, or real-time-video bandwith for video chat), I'd be in the opposite camp and see no reason to pick US-only hosts (DO has Amsterdam datacenters though, and AWS or Azure also have).

For everyone EXCEPT the US-based businesses, being multi-juristiction by default form the get-go is the default, you know. And for any small or freshly created projects GDPR compliance is pretty easy though. EU's new copyright laws though... those are an abomination, hope it changes before they start being enforced. Nowadays EU and US are probably equally horrible and competing at being the most horrible with respect to restricting internet freedoms.

What I'm actually looking for is hosting services that are outside of BOTH US and EU for some more side project ideas that risk falling on the wrong side of IP laws (US's DMCA and all are horrible too btw...). Something that would be both run by a non-US and non-EU company and with datacenters physically outside this space. Something in Middle-East, SE-Asia or Russia could have decent bandwith tot he rest of the civilized world and at the same time be blessed with the capability to delay/ignore/missfile etc. requests from US and EU authorities, giving you a time buffer to damage control if s really hits the fan, while serving end users in those regions. Maybe after Brexit even the UK could become a nice place with more freedom too.

OVH has a montreal datacentre... 9.46ms in additional latency from nyc