Web host moveing to the States???

Hi November,

The main issue for Canadian customers with a US hosting company is the potential conflict between their Patriot Act and our Privacy Laws. You could find your self in a position where disclosing information breaks our laws but not disclosing information breaks their laws (which you, or at least your data are subject to by virtue of being in the US). I took a quick look at your site and it doesn't look like this would apply to you, because you don't ask or keep any information from visitors.

So the only thing to worry about are IP addresses in your ISPs logs. These could potentially be used to figure out who has been visiting your site. I'm not sure that Canadian ISPs would be any better than US ISP's at protecting this info. I think our privacy laws are stronger, but US ISP's might be more willing to fight such a request, especially if it was coming from a Canadian agency. Who knows???

Either way I think you've done all you can and people should know that their IP addresses are in logs on every server they visit. If people are really worried about protecting their identity they should turn off cookies and use a proxy server to annonymize their IP address.

I don't know if it makes a difference, but some hosting companies have branches in different countries. My own site is hosted by JustHost.com. They have a Canadian branch as well as ones in the US, Australia and the UK. I chose them because they welcome adult content and so I thought that meant I wouldn't have hassles from them. Their tech support is terrific, I've found. I've been with them for about three years.

I wouldn't worry about it. Many of our servers are all in the USA as well and no one has every asked to see our logs off the servers. The bandwidth suppliers are much larger so you get better redundancy and much less costs for the bandwidth. Also anyone trying to track you down by host IP would need to go out of country in order to trace back to you, they would need to subpena the host company in order for those records to be released. I doubt very much that any host would just hand over server logs without a court order.

Network traffic technically could be monitored by "big Brother" from the telecom hubs but the size of the computer system needed to track even a small fragment of the overall traffic would cost billions and since most computer techs don't like the idea of that... if something was ever implemented like this in the USA it would be all over the news and internet way before the switch was flipped on.

Server logs are ONLY seen by the ROOT ADMINISTRATOR of the server. Switches and Hubs don't keep ongoing logs of IP traffic and most server logs are purged weekly/daily after the server log reports are created as they take up a lot of room.

A question for (and on behalf of) the paranoid: are there hosting services that don't keep logs at all? After all, what doesn't exist can't be subpoena'd...

A question for (and on behalf of) the paranoid: are there hosting services that don't keep logs at all? After all, what doesn't exist can't be subpoena'd...

i doubt there are any. Logs are helpful in debugging and forensics i.e. break-in attempts. The questions to ask are how long are those logs kept and what is their privacy policy.

Yeah, all server admins run logs (Some limit them to the very basics to save resources) but my fellow techie etasman2000 is absolutely right... no server admin would disable logs as it's the only way to see who is hacking at your server and doing bad things.

Hosting your site overseas causes some very SLOW response times usually. It's getting better but still not great.