Taking your Site Offshore

[Yashraj]

What does offshore mean?

Offshore simply means abroad. In web-hosting, offshore nowadays heavily relates to anything non-US and more towards Netherlands, Sweden, Russia where US bodies like DMCA have little to no jurisdiction.

Why go offshore?

There are 2 major reasons for choosing offshore hosting.

1. Protecting your content/site from being taken down.

This is the case when your site's content is considered illegal in one country. Popular examples are Warez and Porn sites. Warez is banned in US and many other countries. Such countries have specific laws which prevent illegal and copyright content from being hosted on their servers. If your content is hosted on their servers then they can easily produce a court order to have the datacenter delete the hosted data. Porn is also banned in several Islamic countries.
Therefore people move to countries where Freedom of Speech is given more importance and laws pertaining to copyright content are lenient to non-existent.

2. Geo-location

This simply means hosting your website in the(or to the nearest) country from where your major customers/visitors are from.
Consider this, you are selling products in India but your site is hosted in US. Due to this it takes longer time for your pages to be downloaded in India as the data needs to travel a very long distance. On the other hand hosting in India itself results in quick surfing. The difference in time period between both the options in almost negligible, however increases page load period are unattractive.
This is the major driving force for new datacenters opening up in developing countries. Countries like India and China have huge populations and therefore MNCs are hosting their websites on servers based in such countries so that they can reach their target customers easily and quickly. This is why cloud hosting is getting popular since in cloud hosting your data is hosted across several servers across the world resulting in improve page load time and staying 24/7 online.

What all activities and content can offshore hosting protect?

Different countries have different laws for Internet. Depending on it people host warez(copyrighted content), porn, etc. Some datacenters also allow activities like DDOSing, hacking, phishing.
NOTE: No countries laws can protect you from hosting Child Pornography. Child Pornography can result in serious consequences, so stay away from it! Also it would be highly unethical to indulge in such a heinous business. Drugs are another exa

Choosing the right tld

TLD, also known as top level domains(for eg. .com, .org, .in, .eu, .ru, .nl) are also governed by countries. Popular domain extensions like .com, .net, .org are governed by US. So using US TLDs for hosting content against US laws can result in your domain being seized. This is how it looks once your domain is seized: http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/5219/hnqt.png (taken from Libertyreserve.com).
Once again the safe domains here are:
Netherlands- .nl
Russia- .ru

Choosing the right company for domains and web hosting

Even though you may obtain a .ru domain and Swedish hosting, it's important to run a check on the provider of these companies. Several US companies are registrars of .ru tld domains and Swedish hosting, but being based in US, they are still governed by US laws and therefore choosing them is not a good option. To know where the company is based, the best way to check the "About Us" page located in the bottom of the site or you can simply contact them and ask.

Using a WHOIS Privacy guard for your domain

To protect your personal information being made public, you can use a WHOIS privacy guard to hide your personal information displayed when a WHOIS search is performed on a site. Such search can reveal not just your name but also your address and contact number used during the domain registration. This is important if you want to be unreachable to authorities like DMCA.

NOTE: Do not fake registration details! If any issue occurs, you might be asked to product Address and photo ID proofs.

Effective Terms and Conditions

Just going offshore doesn't mean you've protected your site. You also need to maintain a Terms of Service page which separates you from your members.
For eg., on a warez forum, you should mention in your terms and conditions "yoursite.com is note responsible for the data/content posted by a member on yoursite.com". So even if you are taken to court by a lets say Movie publisher, your Terms of Service will save you tons of money from a copyright infringement case.


These are some some of the sites you can use:

prq.se - domain registration and web hosting, expensive but effective in protecting your data can your identity
For more hosting providers, check: http://www.wjunction.com/#hosting
internet.bs - For domain registrations


If I have missed out anything or have any queries, feel free to post below

 

[Jim17]

good explanation of offshore

 

[Mostarac]

Yap but its very hard to find reliable offshore hosting

 

[PandaRDP]

Nice Post Man

Thanks For It

Regards

 

[D4rk]

thanks a lot mate for these info

but tell me , i have a domain name from namecheap with ".org"

is it possible to transfer it to prq.se ? should i put my real info in prq.se ?

 

[Yashraj]

I am not sure if prq.se accepts transfers. You can perhaps email them and ask at info@prq.se
And I would suggest you to use your real information for the domain registration. prq.se does put up a fight when it comes to client confidentiality.

 

[Aleksander]

I don't think .ru domains or hosting are safe either.
From what i've read on nic.ru says:

RU-CENTER, an active member of the Organizing Committee of the Year of Safe Internet in Russia, is taking part in the implementation of research and educational projects aimed at protection of Net against viruses and negative content.

The key purpose of this activity is to build a highly efficient information society in Russia on the basis of a secure and ethical web environment, primarily in relation to the younger generation. RU-CENTER has entered into cooperation agreements with the Russia’s leading organizations countering dissemination of illegal content over the Internet and being engaged in detection, prevention and preclusion of illegal activity with regard to the web resources within the Russian Federation.
Please refer to our partners’ hotlines on the issues of precluding dissemination of illegal content

 

[souza]

If you're doing porn, try Taiwan. There's a court ruling that videos showing people banging are not art and can't be protected by copywrite law. Taiwanese servers are not cheap though

 

[HostHK]

Yap but its very hard to find reliable offshore hosting

You probably means its hard to find an offshore host that allows you to do 'illegal' things.

There is a plethora of 'offshore' hosting companies that offer good and reliable services.

Good/Reliable hosting companies that also allow warez/porn/hacking/DDOS/SPAM etc. are unlikely to be very reliable given the type of customers they attract and the fact that they may be a target for attacks themselves.

Good/Reliable 'bullet proof' hosting probably charge an arm and a leg for their services as they would have much higher costs per customer than a typical DC.

Hosts that offer low cost services to 'dodgy' clients are almost certainly unable to offer reliable service due to these added costs and risks. Most of these hosts are probably hosting such sites in order to spring board themselves to legitimacy. Those who don't make it will collapse and shut down. Those that do, will either go legit or start upping their prices to cover their actual costs.

 

[HostHK]

If you're doing porn, try Taiwan. There's a court ruling that videos showing people banging are not art and can't be protected by copywrite law. Taiwanese servers are not cheap though

Very interesting. Most of Asia have laws of some kind against porn, often requiring some fuzz/mosaic of the 'goodies'. Just checked and it seems that there is no such laws in Taiwan, and indeed very little protection of copyright. Aside from high bandwidth costs, it seems to be an ideal place to host adult content.

 

[luches]

that court verdict was issued sometime ago. Japanese AV producers have been harassing Taiwan Gov for 2 years to create much stricter rules against website illegally hosting Jap AV and such and protect producers' rights ! The court said Porn is filthy and corrupts people and its not even worthy of being considered some sort of art and for such a filthy products Copy right is not applied !

i was like LOLLLOLOLOLOLOLOL after reading this ! that was a hard slap in the face XD !

 

[HostHK]

I'd like to see that article. It sounds amusing! :D

 

[Connor]

Nice share but there's just one thing I don't really agree with.

NOTE: Do not fake registration details! If any issue occurs, you might be asked to product Address and photo ID proofs.

Chances are that if they don't seize domains of any kind they won't care if you use fake registration details. Through my experience, internet.bs doesn't care. Most people wouldn't want their name associated with something that's illegal.