Do you have a realistic idea of how long that would take, and what the risks and costs involved are? How would we "move" the servers, without a significantly higher risk of the data being leaked? Assuming Europe, that's an 8 hour flight at the least.
I'm guessing people are assuming Europe as the bastion of all things good here. Certainly it's more affordable for hosting than Australia, and more reliably connected than anywhere else.
A more realistic scenario, if we had the budget for it, would be to buy a duplicate set of hardware, install it in the theoretical new location, duplicate all the data, grandfather everything running at NYI.
This would be a process that would take months or years of real time as well, plus quite a lot of admin time. Just duplicating all the email, well - I did it recently, I carried an almost full set of backups on encrypted hard disks from New York to Australia (the key was only ever in tmpfs on the host in New York, copied in over ssh inside a VPN link, and all copies nuked and the server rebooted and reinstalled before I left New York) Even filling those disks at the maximum IO rate we could sustain took over a week - and unpacking it at the other end would take as long again.
All this for theoretical security against one of very many risks we face. It is my considered opinion that we can get better return on our security investment (both time and money) in other ways than scrambling to get everything out of the USA.
And "emails being read by the US Government" is only one of very many security threats. We could make our users' emails VERY secure by putting all our servers in the shredder - it might reduce uptime and recoverability of data somewhat...
... so I'm hoping most informed potential customers understand that there are other risks in the world, and we balance our defenses amongst the various risks.
Throwing away everything that's good about our New York hosting in exchange for maybe being more secure against one particular risk is not a decision to make lightly, your assertions nonwithstanding.
You could also just create a second, completely separate setup in Europe running on a new domain. People who don't care about their @fastmail.fm domain or those use their own domain can move to the European setup.
I'm guessing people are assuming Europe as the bastion of all things good here. Certainly it's more affordable for hosting than Australia, and more reliably connected than anywhere else.
A more realistic scenario, if we had the budget for it, would be to buy a duplicate set of hardware, install it in the theoretical new location, duplicate all the data, grandfather everything running at NYI.
This would be a process that would take months or years of real time as well, plus quite a lot of admin time. Just duplicating all the email, well - I did it recently, I carried an almost full set of backups on encrypted hard disks from New York to Australia (the key was only ever in tmpfs on the host in New York, copied in over ssh inside a VPN link, and all copies nuked and the server rebooted and reinstalled before I left New York) Even filling those disks at the maximum IO rate we could sustain took over a week - and unpacking it at the other end would take as long again.
All this for theoretical security against one of very many risks we face. It is my considered opinion that we can get better return on our security investment (both time and money) in other ways than scrambling to get everything out of the USA.
And "emails being read by the US Government" is only one of very many security threats. We could make our users' emails VERY secure by putting all our servers in the shredder - it might reduce uptime and recoverability of data somewhat...
... so I'm hoping most informed potential customers understand that there are other risks in the world, and we balance our defenses amongst the various risks.
Throwing away everything that's good about our New York hosting in exchange for maybe being more secure against one particular risk is not a decision to make lightly, your assertions nonwithstanding.