Hosting in the EU or overseas: what a visitor from Romania notices

A site with visitors from Romania can run on a server in Bucharest, Frankfurt or Virginia. All three will work, but the visitor notices the difference, and for your customers' data the difference is a legal one too.

Distance is measured in milliseconds

A packet of data needs time to reach the server and come back. From Romania, a round trip takes around 30 to 40 milliseconds to a data center in Germany or the Netherlands, over 120 milliseconds to the US East Coast, and over 200 to Asia.

That sounds small, but a page doesn't load in a single round trip. Before the server even starts building the page, the browser makes several: it looks up the server's address in DNS, opens the connection, negotiates HTTPS encryption, and only then requests the page. That's about four round trips. With a server in Germany, it comes to roughly 150 milliseconds. With one in the United States, it's over half a second, and the time to build the page comes on top.

You can measure it yourself. From a terminal, ping your-domain.com shows the time of one round trip. In the browser, the Network tab in the developer tools shows how long each request waited for the first byte (Waiting for server response, or TTFB).

What a CDN fixes

A CDN such as Cloudflare keeps copies of images, CSS and JavaScript files in cities around the world, including near Romania. For those files, the distance to your server stops mattering.

The HTML pages WordPress generates still come from your server in most setups. So do a shop's cart and checkout, search, forms and wp-admin. An administrator in Iași writing posts on a server in California waits on every save, however good the CDN is.

Where the data lives

A WordPress site holds personal data even if it isn't a shop: user accounts, comments with email addresses, form messages, orders. GDPR doesn't forbid keeping them outside the European Union, but it requires a legal basis for the transfer, such as a European Commission adequacy decision or standard contractual clauses, and your privacy policy has to say so.

With the server and the backups in the EU, the transfer question doesn't arise for your hosting. Check where the backups are kept too: some providers keep the site in Europe and the backups on another continent.

At AYT, the servers are in data centers in the European Union, on NVMe disks, and your data and backups stay in the EU.

Support and invoices

A provider close to you answers in your time zone and usually in your language. With a problem at 10 in the morning, it matters whether support has just gone to bed or just arrived at the office.

An invoice from a provider outside the country often comes in dollars or euros, with reverse-charge VAT if your company is VAT-registered. Your accountant has to handle it separately every month. At AYT, the invoice is issued by a Romanian company, with your company's tax ID checked against ANAF, and the prices shown are final because the company isn't VAT-registered.

When a distant server makes sense

If most of your visitors are in the United States or Asia, the server should be close to them, and a Romanian company with customers there does well to host there. For a site read mainly in Romania and neighbouring countries, a server in the EU is the simple choice, with a short path to visitors and their data kept in the EU.

See the AYT plans, all on servers in the European Union.