Hosting in Amsterdam for UK Businesses

Why Amsterdam

Amsterdam is one of the best connected places on the internet. AMS-IX, the exchange where networks swap traffic, is one of the largest in the world, and most of the networks your customers use are present there. That means short, direct routes to almost everywhere in Europe, including the UK.

It is also where we can get the space, power and connectivity we want at a price that keeps our plans fair. That is why our managed hosting, managed databases and storage run there. Our cPanel hosting and email stay in Coventry.

Is it slow from the UK?

No. A round trip from London to Amsterdam typically takes under 10 milliseconds. For comparison, a page from a well built website usually takes a few hundred milliseconds to load, and most of that time is spent in the application and the browser, not on the network.

Your visitors will not notice the difference. What they will notice is a slow database query, an overloaded server or a missing cache, and those are the things we spend our time on.

What about data protection?

Under UK GDPR, personal data can be sent from the UK to countries in the European Economic Area, including the Netherlands, without extra paperwork. The EU also recognises the UK as having adequate protection, so data can flow the other way too.

In practice, hosting in Amsterdam does not change your obligations. You still need to know what personal data you hold, why, and for how long. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, and our Privacy Policy and Data Retention Policy set out exactly what we do with data we handle for you.

If your contracts or your sector require data to stay in the UK, tell us before you order and we will talk through the options.

Where do backups go?

Every server is backed up every night. An encrypted copy is sent to a separate provider in Germany, so a problem in Amsterdam cannot take your backups with it. The copy is encrypted before it leaves our network, and only we hold the keys.

The short version

Amsterdam gives us fast routes to the UK and Europe, sensible costs and a straightforward legal position. If you have a question about where your data lives, ask us and you will get a straight answer from an engineer.