What is Offshore Hosting and Why it need

The role of the state in people’s daily lives is expanding more and more as time goes on. With the introduction of new regulations and laws, governments are attempting to increasingly restrict speech of freedom. The online world is no exception.

Any information spread on the internet—be it texts, photos, videos, or anything else—is inevitably stored somewhere. You might think you’re protecting yourself or that your information is securely stored on a reliable hosting service or server, but in reality, that’s not entirely true.

Ultimately, the state can “track down” any information by approaching the company where you store it, such as on various servers. In fact, any government can contact a hosting provider—sometimes with a court order, officially—and retrieve your data.

If you want to protect your information, you need to use several methods together.

For example, there are so-called offshore hosting services (in this blog post - Offshore Hosting 2025: Protection of Sensitive Data and Freedom of Speech, I’ve written about various offshore hosting options and their services, which might be useful to you).

What does offshore hosting mean?

In the traditional sense, offshore hosting means that the hosting service you use is located in a different country from yours—one with a legal framework different from your own country’s regulations.
For instance, if you’re in the U.S., it implies that the hosting should be in another country, like the Netherlands.

You can research your country’s legislation to see how well it protects personal information and how reliable its legal system is, because in any case, if they need to, they can obtain any information.

Additionally, when choosing an offshore hosting service, you should select a country with a relatively better legal system that effectively protects personal data. Some hosting providers even offer registration without requiring personal information.

Personal information is considered relatively well-protected in places like the Netherlands, Iceland, and Sweden.

It’s important to consider the physical location of the server where you plan to store your information.