Buying guide · residency
When residency is the requirement,
the region picker is not the answer
If a contract, a regulator or a client has told you that certain data must stay in a specific jurisdiction, the shortlist is smaller than it looks — and the obvious option solves a different problem than the one you have.
A region is a location, not a jurisdiction
Hyperscaler regions control where data is stored. They do not change which legal system can compel the provider, because that follows the corporate entity, not the datacentre. If your requirement is jurisdictional, a region setting does not meet it.
This is not a criticism of hyperscalers. They are extraordinary engineering, they publish transparency reports, and for the overwhelming majority of workloads a region is exactly the right control. It is a statement about which problem the tool solves. See the CLOUD Act explained for why the distinction bites.
The three shapes of answer
| Option | What it gives you | What it does not |
|---|---|---|
| Hyperscaler region (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) | Enormous service breadth, elasticity, mature tooling and certifications. Data stored in the region you select. | Separation from the provider's home jurisdiction. Predictable cost at small scale. Egress charges apply on the way out. |
| Local generic hosting | In-country storage, usually cheap, often a familiar control panel. | Frequently a reseller of someone else's capacity, so ownership and continuity are unclear. Ask who owns the building. |
| Sovereign provider with its own facility | A single identifiable legal system, verifiable physical infrastructure, direct human support, flat pricing. | The service catalogue of a hyperscaler. If you need forty managed services, this is not that. |
The questions that actually separate providers
Most vendor comparisons drown in specifications. These five answers tell you more than a feature matrix:
- Do you own the building, or rent space in it? Ownership determines who controls physical access and whose continuity risk you inherit.
- What is your corporate structure? Parents, subsidiaries and branches determine legal reach far more than server location does.
- Show me the routing. Which carriers, how many, and does traffic transit a third country by default?
- Where do backups live? The answer quietly undoes many residency claims.
- What does it cost to leave? Egress fees and proprietary formats are the real lock-in, not the contract term.
Where Secure Shore fits — and where it does not
Secure Shore is the third shape. Cloud storage, virtual servers and dedicated servers, run from a purpose-built, privately owned, carrier-neutral facility in Nassau that the company has operated since 2015, on Bahamian-domiciled IP space across four independent carriers.
Pricing is flat and published: storage from free through US$45/month for a business team, virtual servers from US$40/month, dedicated servers from US$350/month. No egress charges to model, no per-request billing to forecast.
What it is not: a hyperscaler. There is no managed Kubernetes, no serverless runtime, no forty-service catalogue. If your architecture depends on that, use the tool that provides it. If your requirement is that a defined set of records lives under one legal system, on infrastructure someone will show you, in a building the operator owns — that is what this is built for.
Common questions
Is a hyperscaler region enough to satisfy a data residency clause?
It depends entirely on how the clause is written. If it requires storage in a country, a region generally satisfies it. If it requires that no foreign authority can compel disclosure, or that the processor be established locally, a region alone does not. Read the clause before choosing the architecture.
Do I have to move everything?
No, and usually you should not. The common pattern is splitting by sensitivity: regulated, privileged or commercially sensitive records go to the sovereign provider, while general workloads stay where they already run well.
What about latency from a Caribbean facility?
Nassau is roughly 180 miles from Miami, one of the main interconnection points for the Americas, so latency to North America is workable for storage, backup and most business applications. For latency-critical end-user workloads, test with your own traffic before committing.
Are there egress fees?
No. Pricing is a flat monthly figure by plan, published on the site. Getting your data out does not generate a bill.
Compare it against what you are paying now
Published flat pricing, a free tier to test with real files, and a phone number that reaches a person in Nassau.