As with many companies changing their privacy policies to be GDPR compliant, Bluehost, Hostgator, and iPage updated their privacy policy. Unfortunately, they are switching to the privacy policy of their parent company, Endurance. Bluehost's old privacy policy (https://www.bluehost.com/terms/privacy-policy) is "Bluehost will not provide or sell to any third party your personal information and will keep all Subscriber information confidential... Bluehost does not share personally identifiable information about individual users with advertisers." The new privacy policy (https://www.endurance.com/privacy/privacy) is "When we share personal information with certain third-party partners, including marketing and advertising partners, that information includes your name, email address and other information enabling partners to.." Other information could be anything they want it to be, which is obviously unacceptable for a company hosting my personal e-mail. I may as well use Gmail with the new privacy policy instead of paying them to host it.
Are there any good hosting providers left that actually respect privacy? The new Endurance policy applies to Bluehost, Hostgator, and iPage, so those are out. InMotion's privacy policy is no better stating that they will share your personal information with other companies and for advertising purposes. GoDaddy has had a history of very questionable ethics (SOPA, bidding against customers for domains). 1&1 and Dreamhost ("we will not provide to or sell to any third party your personal information and will keep all such data confidential") may be options; other good options and opinions?. Namecheap has an acceptable privacy policy and they are cheap, but from reviews you get what you pay for performance wise and they have had problems with being blocked for hosting spam services. E-mail hosting for private domains that isn't blocked by spam filters is a requirement for me. Feel free to discuss both shared hosting and VPS.
8 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 49.4 ms ] threadI am fine with a privacy policy that has a section for using my data to provide the service (Service Providers section) and to share my data with companies that they use to provide services (as long as those companies must adhere to the same restrictions). As per your example of Twilio, that is fine as long as their contract with Twilio ("trusted business partners are subject to confidentiality agreements") states that Twilio won't sell my phone number to advertisers.
The Security and Compliance Center in Microsoft 365/Office 365/Azure is just fantastic.
Didn't look into their privacy policy myself, but they see honest and no-bullshit so I would be really surprised if they used your data for anything besides legal compliance.
Here are a few good European hosting providers I have used, I dunno what their privacy policies say.
ovh.com Cheap and hosted in France and Canada great to cover both Europe and America
hetzner.de Cheap and hosted in germany, great support.
prq.se These guys specialise in proving privacy focused hosting, Wikileaks used them. You can pay with bitcoin and they store none of your details. Super expensive tho.