Why we moved our servers to Iceland

30 Mar 2019 - Adriaan van Rossum

As the founder of Simple Analytics, I have always been mindful for the need of trust and transparency for our customers. We would like to be held accountable for our customers needs, so they can sleep in peace. The choices we make has to be optimal, in terms of privacy, for the visitors and our customers. One of the crucial choices to consider was, choosing the location of our servers.

Why moving our servers?

It all started with our website being added to EasyList. It’s a list with domain names which are used by popular ad-blockers. I asked why Simple Analytics was added because we don’t track visitors of our customers’ websites. We even respect the “Do Not Track” settings in the browser.

So I replied the following to the Pull Request on GitHub:

[…] So if we keep blocking the companies that do good, and respect the privacy of the users, what kind of sign is it to just block those companies? I think it’s wrong and we shouldn’t put every company on the list just because they are sending a request. […]

I got a reply to my comment from @cassowary714:

Everyone says what you are saying, but I don’t want to see my requests sent to a US company (in your case, Digital Ocean […]

I didn’t like this reply at first, but after sharing it with my community, people pointed it out to me that he indeed was correct about the fact the US government is able to access the data of our users. At that time, our servers were indeed running on Digital Ocean and they could pull out our drive and read our data.

read moar here: https://blog.simpleanalytics.io/why-we-moved-our-servers-to-iceland