Increasingly hosting, for email and web, is being taken over by a small number of very big players who have a global reach such as Google, Amazon, Alicloud, Hotmail, Office 360, etc. These giant hosting companies have data-centres across many continents and tens and thousands of engineers are hired on a full-time basis for handling support, troubleshooting and managing user data. Because these giants operate in virtually every jurisdiction in the world and are constantly trying to expand their markets they often comply (all too easily) with local governments and hand over sensitive personal data (such as emails) to them without the knowledge of the user. Many of the times they will told that they have an injunction or a person is under criminal investigation and straight away your personal data is handed over to this government without your knowledge.
For tax reasons and other tax efficiency reasons some individuals may choose offshore jurisdictions for incorporating their businesses and also as such as may choose to host their websites and emails in these offshore jurisdictions as part of their strategy for increased tax efficiency. However, if the emails are hosted on services like Office 360 or Gmail then these individuals run into the risk of (i) certain governments getting hold of private emails because the end user does not really have control on their private emails and (ii) tax authorities may argue that the management of the company (ie. the brains of the company) is where the emails are hosted and therefore are subject to local tax.
So, sometimes to mitigate the risk of emails and other important personal data being handed to authorities without one’s prior knowledge it may be worth hosting your emails and web yourself so that you one has full control on who the personal data will be handed over to and when. However, email hosting is quite a specialised field that requires quite extensive knowledge and experience to manage properly so that delivery, spam filtering, high availability, user interface, easy management, etc. are all done properly. So one may not wish to undertake this daunting task by one self and instead it may be easier to outsource this to a trusted supplier who can help with this task.
For offshore email hosting, we have identified 2 locations that we think are optimal for such purposes:- (i) Hong Kong and (ii) Singapore. These locations both have:-
- Great Connectivity around the world and China
- Stable in terms of electricity supply and Superb reliability in terms of hosting infrastructure
- Politically Stable
- Home to a lot of great engineers who are reliable and trustworthy
- Good English-speaking support
And we have identified 2 very reliable boutique email hosting companies who have been operating for over 2 decades and are already serving clients globally who can serve the needs for offshore email hosting; due to the fact these companies do not operate in the US or China or Europe they have no direct need to respond to the authorities from these regions; instead their priorities would be to serve their clients needs as a first and foremost priority.
For Hong Kong Offshore Email Hosting
Hodfords (https://www.hodfords.com/) – they do other things other hosting but they do offer great hosting – one just needs to make the enquiry
For Singapore Office Email Hosting
Netdeploy (https://www.netdeploy.com/) – they are quite good at hosting in Singapore.
