Knowledgebase

It is a fair question and rarely answered plainly: where is my site, physically? The answer matters for three reasons — speed, where the data is kept, and what you can do about it.

Where they are, precisely

Our shared hosting servers are in Falkenstein, Germany, in a Hetzner data centre. It is not a vague location: it is the same facility for all four brands in the group, and the portal and hosting machines answer each other in under half a millisecond — because they sit side by side.

Why Europe and not locally

That is the next question, and the honest answer is this: what makes hosting reliable is not distance — it is power that does not fail, cooling, redundant links to several carriers, and staff on site around the clock. In European data centres that is the norm, and the cost per server is a fraction of what building the equivalent in the region would be.

A server that is closer but goes down when the power does is not faster: it is offline. We would rather have the latency you can compensate for than the outage you cannot.

What that means for speed

It means every request from a visitor makes the trip to Europe and back. That time is real and we will not pretend otherwise — but it weighs far less than people imagine, for two reasons: most of the time a site takes to open is spent building the page and downloading images, not travelling; and a well-built page makes few trips.

We do not publish a figure in milliseconds here because it depends on your network operator and the route it takes — two customers in the same city can see different times. But you can measure yours in half a minute:

What genuinely solves the distance

A CDN keeps copies of your site in dozens of cities and serves each visitor from the nearest one. A visitor in Maputo or Luanda then gets the images and files from close by, and only the genuinely dynamic parts make the full trip. Cloudflare has a free plan that does exactly this, and it is switched on by changing the domain's nameservers.

Where your data sits, and under which law

Your site's files, the database and the mailboxes are stored in Germany. That means they are in a European Union country, under the European data protection regime — one of the most demanding there is. For most customers that is an advantage rather than a problem.

If your line of work has rules about where data may be held — it happens in health, in banking and in some public tenders — confirm that before signing up, and talk to us: there are options. For what applies to your site, see personal data protection: what applies to your website.

What distance does not affect

E-mail is not noticeable: a message arrives in seconds and nobody notices tenths. Nor is cPanel — you use it now and then, not on every click. And the domain even less: what answers for the name are DNS servers, and those are spread around the world.

If you want the exact address of the server your account is on, it is in cPanel — see what your hosting IP address is and where to find it.