Five Eyes-free hosting
Answer
Seven of Incognito VPS’s eight locations sit outside every documented Eyes intelligence-sharing tier: Iceland, Switzerland, Panama, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia. Only the Netherlands participates, at the Nine Eyes level. Alliance membership affects intelligence sharing, not commercial hosting requests, which travel through mutual legal assistance.
What the alliances are
Five Eyes is a signals-intelligence agreement between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, originating in the 1946 UKUSA Agreement. Nine Eyes adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway. Fourteen Eyes — formally SIGINT Seniors Europe — adds Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
They govern the exchange of intercepted signals intelligence between agencies. They are not treaties about commercial data requests, and this is where most hosting marketing gets it wrong.
The honest version of what this buys you
A police request for your customer record does not travel through a signals-intelligence alliance. It travels through mutual legal assistance, or a European Investigation Order inside the EU, or a domestic warrant. Choosing a non-Eyes country does not slow that down at all if the country is otherwise cooperative.
What alliance membership does correlate with is bulk collection infrastructure and the informal habit of sharing. If your threat model includes traffic interception at the network layer rather than a formal request to your provider, non-membership genuinely matters. If your threat model is a civil claimant or a regulator, the mutual-legal-assistance picture on each location page matters far more, and the Eyes question is close to irrelevant.
Our footprint against the tiers
Iceland, Switzerland, Panama, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia have no documented participation in any tier. The Netherlands is a Nine Eyes participant, and we sell it anyway because it has the best peering in Europe by a wide margin and many workloads should optimise for that instead.
We would rather tell you that than quietly leave the Netherlands off a page like this.
Frequently asked questions
01 Which of your locations are in Five Eyes?
None. Five Eyes is the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and we operate in none of them. The Netherlands participates at the Nine Eyes level and is the only alliance member on our map.
02 Does non-membership stop a police request?
No. Commercial data requests travel through mutual legal assistance or domestic warrants, not intelligence alliances. Alliance membership correlates with bulk interception, which is a different threat.
03 Why do you still sell the Netherlands?
Because AMS-IX peering with 1,100+ direct adjacencies and 25 Gbps uplinks is the best network on our map, and plenty of workloads should optimise for that. The location page states the Nine Eyes participation explicitly.
04 Which location is furthest from all of them?
Panama, geographically and legally — no alliance participation and no MLAT in force with most EU states. Note the existing US MLAT: it is distance from Brussels rather than from Washington.
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