Location is the one decision in the configurator that is genuinely hard to change your mind about later — migration is supported and free, but the IP changes and DNS has to follow. Getting it right first time is worth five minutes of thought.
Start with the question you are actually answering
There are only three, and they pull in different directions:
- Whose courts do I want to be answerable to? → jurisdiction
- Where are my users? → latency
- How much am I willing to pay? → price index
If jurisdiction dominates
- Romania or Bulgaria — the pragmatic default. EU-grade infrastructure and data protection, and no US takedown clock. Note the trade: both are EU Member States, so the Digital Services Act applies and a substantiated complaint does get assessed on its merits. If you cannot articulate a more specific threat, choose Romania.
- Iceland — statutory source protection under the Media Act (No. 38/2011), and a removal duty tied to a court injunction under Act No. 30/2002. Those two Acts are the whole of the legal case for Reykjavík, and the location page explains what else gets cited here and why it does not help. The right answer for journalism, leak portals and archives.
- Panama — constitutional protection of private correspondence, with demands routed through Panamanian courts. Do not choose it as a US firewall: a criminal request from the United States has had a treaty route into Panama since 1995, executed by Panamanian courts.
- Moldova or Seychelles — the furthest from EU and US process. Maximum distance, at the cost of latency and price, and remember Moldova and the US are both Budapest Convention parties.
If latency dominates
| Your users are in | Choose |
|---|---|
| Western Europe | Amsterdam 🇳🇱 |
| Eastern Europe, Turkey | Bucharest 🇷🇴 or Sofia 🇧🇬 |
| North America | Kansas City 🇺🇸 (not offshore) or Reykjavík 🇮🇸 |
| Latin America | Panama City 🇵🇦 |
| Middle East, South Asia | Victoria 🇸🇨 |
Every location page publishes a ping target and a test file. Measure before you buy rather than trusting a table, including this one.
The price index is real, not a markup
The multiplier on each location reflects genuine differences in transit and facility cost. Kansas City at ×0.95 is cheaper because US bandwidth is cheap. Seychelles at ×1.40 is expensive because bandwidth on an island genuinely is. Nothing is inflated to make another location look good.
A common mistake worth avoiding
Buying Seychelles "to be safe" when the actual concern is a marketing database. If your threat model is data brokers and breaches, any of our locations solves it — because we never collected the data — and you would be paying a 40% premium and 140 ms of latency for nothing. Match the location to the threat.