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Ask HN: Who is the best web host outside the US?

3 points by chrisblackwell ↗ HN
With everything going down lately with the NSA, I'm sure we are all getting a little anxious about our data sitting on US servers (especially if you are not a US citizen and therefore have no rights).

Who would you host your website with, or your server with? I'd love to hear everyone's recommendations.

8 comments

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thesmileyone
I host with TSOhost in the UK, they are absolutely awesome.
venomsnake
I would say take it easy. A lot of powerful lobbies are up in arms right now - see how things will turn out. If there is wide migration outside of US (which seems likely at the moment) I am not sure that the rest of the world have the capacity and bandwidth to accommodate such traffic. So having disruption in the service but outside of NSA reach may not be that good of a trade off.

Also migrating content outside of US is not as easy as it sounds - US have the strongest free speech protection right now so you have to make sure you are in compliance with the local laws - In wide parts of Europe stuff that is illegal is - Nazi symbols, holocaust denial, pornography and in a weird case - bank rumors "I think bank X is threatened by insolvency" is punishable by fine and maybe jail time in Bulgaria no matter if it is honest opinion or even truth. Britain have insane libel law and so on.

ben_pr
Take a look at this one: http://www.nine.ch/. It might be worth looking first at countries that don't honor U.S. extradition, which Switzerland up until a few years ago was strongly in that corner but lately they have been giving finance info etc to the U.S.

Some other sites have already done the work so look for sites that you are sure would not be hosted in the U.S. and then try this: http://whatmyip.co

mhd
Hetzner often gets recommended, not sure whether the recent security troubles will (or should) change that.

Although you probably should look into a country that itself has no troubling issues, which wouldn't quite apply to Germany. Don't a lot of the file sharing sites run from Switzerland because of that. And speaking about them, maybe New Zealand is worth a look, too.

balac
Would simply choosing a non-US data centre location with a US company provide any kind of protection?