All docs
4 min read

Regional hosting

Formspring runs in two regions: EU (Falkenstein, Germany) and US (Ashburn, Virginia). The default for new teams is EU. Where your data lives is determined at signup and stays there unless you migrate.

What's in each region

The same stack runs in both regions. The difference is purely geography.

Component EU region US region
Primary database Hetzner Cloud, Falkenstein Hetzner Cloud, Ashburn
Object storage (file uploads) Hetzner Storage Box, Falkenstein Hetzner Object Storage, Ashburn
Background workers Same region as database Same region as database
Backups Same region as database, encrypted Same region as database, encrypted
Edge / CDN Cloudflare global (cached pages only) Cloudflare global (cached pages only)

Submissions, files, and metadata never leave the team's region. The only data that travels:

  • Stripe billing (US-hosted; legally required for card processing)
  • Postmark email delivery (region depends on Postmark's routing)
  • Akismet spam classification (US-hosted; only when the form has Akismet enabled)
  • hCaptcha challenge verification (region depends on hCaptcha's routing)

Each of those is a separate sub-processor with its own DPA — see sub-processors.

Default region

New teams default to EU. We picked that because:

  • The majority of our customers are European
  • GDPR compliance is straightforward without needing SCC paperwork for the primary data store
  • The latency is fine for non-EU teams that don't have hard residency requirements

If you're a US-only operation and want US residency from day one, request it during signup or contact us within 7 days of creating the team.

Pinning a region

You can pin your team to a specific region two ways:

At signup

The signup page has a Region picker (visible if you arrive from a regional landing page or click "advanced options"). Pick EU or US, finish signup. Done.

After signup

Email info@pixelandprocess.de from the team owner's address with:

  • Team slug
  • Target region
  • Reason (helps us prioritize; "GDPR residency requirement" or "customer contract requires US data" are common)

A region migration involves:

  1. We schedule a maintenance window with you (usually 30-60 minutes, off-peak)
  2. We snapshot the primary database, transfer the snapshot, restore in the target region
  3. We transfer object storage (this is the slow part — depends on volume; up to several hours)
  4. DNS routing flips to the new region
  5. We run a verification pass, then unlock the team

During the window, the team is read-only — submissions are queued for replay after the cutover so no data is lost. We've done dozens of these without incident.

Region migration is included on Scale plans at no extra charge. On Pro and Team it's a one-time $250 fee to cover the engineer time.

Confirming where your data is

Your dashboard footer shows the region:

Formspring · Pro · region: eu-falkenstein

The REST API returns the region in GET /api/v1/team:

{
  "team": {
    "slug": "acme",
    "region": "eu-falkenstein",
    "plan_key": "pro"
  }
}

The MCP get_team tool returns the same field.

Sub-region considerations

We don't pin to specific data centers within a region. Within EU, that means any of Hetzner's German DCs (FSN1, NBG1, HEL1) — they're all inside Germany. Within US, any of Hetzner's US DCs (currently ASH1).

If you have a hard contractual requirement for a specific country (e.g. France-only), that's a Scale conversation — we don't currently offer single-country pins as a standard feature.

Cross-region backups?

No. EU backups stay in EU. US backups stay in US. We don't replicate across regions — that would defeat the purpose of regional hosting.

This means an entire-region outage at Hetzner could interrupt service for one region without affecting the other. We accept this trade-off because cross-region replication of personal data is what most data-residency clauses are written to prevent.

What's next

← Previous
Data retention
Next →
Sub-processors