Offshore hosting
Answer
Offshore hosting places your server in a jurisdiction chosen for its legal properties rather than its latency. Incognito VPS operates in eight: Iceland, Switzerland, Panama, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Russia. Each location page publishes the statutes and court decisions that back its claims, so you can verify them.
Offshore is a legal decision, not a marketing adjective
The word "offshore" is used so loosely in hosting that it has almost stopped meaning anything. A provider will call a Frankfurt rack offshore because the company is registered in Belize. That is not how enforcement works. What matters is where the hardware physically sits, because that is the jurisdiction whose police can walk into the building.
The second thing that matters is which cooperation instruments bind that jurisdiction. An EU member state is reachable by a European Investigation Order, which is fast and near-automatic between member states. A non-EU state falls back to mutual legal assistance or letters rogatory, which take months and can be refused. That difference is the entire product.
How to actually choose
Start from the adversary, not from the marketing. If your concern is a US copyright claimant, any non-US jurisdiction without a bilateral IP-enforcement treaty already solves it, and you should optimise for latency and price instead — Bulgaria or Moldova. If your concern is a European regulator, you want distance from EU judicial cooperation: Panama, Iceland or Switzerland. If it is a commercial competitor filing civil claims, Switzerland’s dual-criminality requirement is the strongest filter available.
And if your concern is a state actor with signals-intelligence capability, no hosting jurisdiction solves that. Encryption and operational discipline solve it, and the jurisdiction choice is a second-order decision. We would rather say that than sell you Iceland.
What we publish for each location
Every location page carries a legal dossier: the specific statute or court decision behind each claim, with its year, so you can look it up. Where a jurisdiction has a weakness, the page says so in a section headed "the trade-off" — the Netherlands page states plainly that the country participates in Nine Eyes, and the Russia page states plainly that SORM interception is mandatory.
This is unusual, and we do it for a self-interested reason as well as an honest one: a claim you can verify is worth more than a claim you cannot, both to you and to anything that indexes this page.
Frequently asked questions
01 Which offshore jurisdiction is strongest?
Iceland for speech-related work, thanks to constitutional protection plus the IMMI source-protection framework and no hosting retention mandate. Switzerland is strongest for regulatory defensibility because foreign requests need mutual legal assistance with dual-criminality review.
02 Does offshore hosting put me outside the law?
No. It changes which law applies and how quickly a foreign party can reach it. We comply with valid orders from the jurisdictions we operate in, and our acceptable-use policy prohibits illegal content everywhere.
03 Is offshore hosting slower?
It depends on the location, not on the concept. Amsterdam is 7 ms from Frankfurt and Zürich is 8 ms. Panama is 130 ms from Europe because of physics. Every location page publishes measured latency from five sources.
04 Can I run servers in more than one jurisdiction?
Yes, and for redundancy you should. One token can hold servers in all eight locations simultaneously, and encrypted snapshots can be stored in a different jurisdiction from the server they belong to.
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