Switzerland VPS & offshore servers.
Non-EU privacy law, central European reach.

Legal profile

EU status

Outside the EU and the EEA

Digital Services Act

Not Swiss law

Data protection

Revised FADP, in force since 1 September 2023

Traffic data retention

Six months, for telecommunications service providers

Press freedom

8th of 180 (RSF, 2026)

Switzerland belongs to neither the EU nor the EEA, so EU regulations such as the Digital Services Act are not Swiss law. The Federal Council has proposed a narrower national law instead. Its draft Federal Act on Communication Platforms and Search Engines, put out for consultation on 29 October 2025, would apply only to very large platforms and search engines used by about 10% of the population each month (Federal Council). A hosting company of our size is not its target.

The Federal Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and media freedom, prohibits censorship and protects editorial secrecy (Articles 16 and 17). RSF ranks Switzerland 8th in 2026, but criticizes banking-secrecy rules that penalize journalists who publish protected bank data, and civil "provisional measures" that let judges stop a publication before it appears.

Hosting liability and copyright

Swiss law has no statutory notice-and-takedown procedure. Hosts are judged under general civil and criminal law, and three rules shape practice:

• Stay-down. Since 1 April 2020, Article 39d of the Copyright Act requires a hosting provider whose service has created a particular risk of infringement, for example through a technical design or business model that favors it, to take reasonable measures so that a work removed after notification is not made available again (IPKat).
• Participation in personality violations. Under Article 28 of the Civil Code, anyone who participates in a violation of personality rights can be ordered to end it. In 2013 the Federal Supreme Court applied this to a newspaper that hosted a blog, without requiring fault (5A_792/2011). Defamation claims therefore have a real path to a removal order.
• No blocking duty for access providers. In 2019 the same court held that Swisscom could not be ordered to block sites offering pirated films, because providing internet access is not participation in the infringement (4A_433/2018).

A voluntary Hosting Code of Conduct, drawn up by the industry association simsa, describes a notice-and-notice procedure. It is self-regulation, not law.

Data protection and retention

The revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) has applied since 1 September 2023. It brought Swiss law close to the GDPR, with records of processing, breach reporting to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) and privacy by design, while keeping Swiss features such as fines of up to CHF 250,000 imposed on responsible individuals. On 15 January 2024 the European Commission confirmed that Switzerland still offers an adequate level of protection, so personal data can flow from the EU without extra safeguards (Hunton).

Retention is where Switzerland is stricter than its reputation. Under Article 26(5) of the Surveillance of Post and Telecommunications Act (SPTA), telecommunications service providers must keep secondary telecommunications data, meaning metadata, for six months. The Federal Supreme Court upheld the regime in 2018 (1C_598/2016), and the challengers took the case to the European Court of Human Rights. Providers of derived communication services, a category that covers services such as messaging, email and cloud storage, carry lighter duties: they must tolerate surveillance and hand over data they already hold, but they do not have to store traffic data in advance (Federal Supreme Court, 2C_544/2020).

That line may move. A 2025 draft revision of the surveillance ordinance (VÜPF) would require services with at least 5,000 users to identify their customers and would extend six-month metadata retention to larger providers (heise). After a hostile consultation, the Federal Council took note of the results on 11 February 2026, commissioned an external impact assessment and announced a second consultation (Federal Council). The plan is paused, not dropped, and we will update this page if it is adopted.

What we keep is set out in our privacy policy: your email address, your balance and payment records, your sign-in sessions (browser and country, never the IP address) and your service records. We do not log or inspect the traffic on your server.

Switzerland is not in the Five, Nine or 14 Eyes intelligence-sharing groups. Those groups share intercepted communications; data on a server in Zürich is still obtained through Swiss procedures, as our guide to what the 14 Eyes mean for hosting explains.

How we handle complaints here

1. Every complaint about a server in Zürich is logged and checked against Swiss law.
2. A US DMCA notice is answered, not enforced. It has no legal force in Switzerland, so nothing happens to your server.
3. A valid order of a Swiss court can require action, for example a removal order under Article 28 of the Civil Code or an injunction in a copyright case. A letter from a rights holder is not an order: we check it against Swiss law and forward it to you. You are informed first and can respond, unless a court forbids disclosure.
4. Requests and outcomes are published in our quarterly transparency report, without customer data.

Requests from criminal authorities follow the process on our law enforcement page.

Who it suits

• Privacy-focused businesses that want a non-EU location with independent courts, a predictable legal system and data protection the EU recognizes as adequate.
• Audiences in German-, French- and Italian-speaking Europe. Zürich is about 300 km from Frankfurt and 220 km from Milan in a straight line.
• Compute-heavy workloads on current AMD hardware, with four dedicated configurations from the Ryzen 7 7700 to the EPYC 7402P.
• Backups, archives and internal business tools that you want under Swiss rather than EU jurisdiction.

Available in Zürich

Network and latency

Zürich is Switzerland's main interconnection point. SwissIX, a non-profit association and the largest internet exchange in the country, is present in eight data centers across Switzerland. In a straight line, Zürich is about 220 km from Milan, 300 km from Frankfurt, 490 km from Paris and 610 km from Amsterdam, and traffic to these hubs travels over terrestrial fiber.

Switzerland is landlocked, so intercontinental traffic reaches subsea cables through neighboring countries. For users in central Europe, Zürich and Amsterdam are our two closest locations; for the UK and North America, Amsterdam usually has the edge. Our network page lists latency estimates and shows how to measure the real latency yourself. To compare Zürich with our other non-EU options, read Iceland vs Switzerland vs Moldova.