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Which country your customers' information sits in
Your customers' records sit in a European region, every provider that touches them is named in public with the region it works in, and where they sit is settled before anything is built.
What arrives
- A European region
- holds your customers' records and your files
- Every provider
- that touches them is named in public, with where it works
- Settled first
- because moving it later is a move rather than a switch
- What is stored
- stays put; what is served is copied close to your visitor on purpose
- Where something
- is handled elsewhere it is listed, under the standard legal protections
- No answer
- you have to ask me for - the list is a page you can open
Settled before there is anything to move#
Where information sits is chosen when a thing is first created, not adjusted afterwards. Changing it later means moving everything and pointing everything else at the new place - perfectly doable, and not a setting. So it is one of the first questions rather than one of the last.
Served and stored are two different questions#
A fast site works by keeping copies of its pages and its pictures in cities near the people reading them. That is the whole trick, and it is why your site opens quickly for somebody on the other side of the world.
Your customers' records are a different thing. They are not copied around like that. They sit where they were put, and only the public face of the site travels.
The sentence I will not write#
You will see suppliers promise that your data never leaves the country. It is a comfortable sentence and very few people can honestly stand behind it. Some of what a modern business runs on is handled outside Europe - that is true here too, it is written down in public rather than buried, and it carries the standard legal protections for information that crosses a border.
What I will write down instead is where your records are kept and who else touches them along the way. That is a promise with an address on it, and it is one you can check for yourself without asking me.