In this post i will describe major differences between onshore and offshore servers and will tell you which best and suitable for hosting business. So lets start…
Offshore traditionally refers to small island jurisdictions, thus not on any country’s shore. These jurisdictions have limited infrastructure which results in increased latency, decreased throughput, higher cost, and vulnerability to DDoS attacks.
The theory is that if you’re offshore you can host content that you could not host elsewhere. This is mostly only true with online gaming where licensing countries require locally hosted content.
A couple of other key points:
- The only content that is specifically illegal to host in the U.S. is child pornography. Any other restrictions are set by the provider, not by law.
- Netherlands and other EU countries are not “offshore“
- The main benefit to providing offshore hosting is the ability to sell the perceived concept that having content outside the U.S. makes you “safer.”
What is best for hosting business:
In my opinion offshore server is best for web hosting business where your client or your reseller’s clients may host some not acceptable contents in US and might be against to US laws, in this situation you might get your server got suspended due to violating TOS of onshore server. On the other hand, on offshore location your server will not be suspended or terminated as server provide will only send you legal notices to remove the contents and if you do not take any action your IP will get banned instead of server suspension which may later you can unblock by removing and informing the server provider.
