In brief: if you have an account on www.pythonanywhere.com you can have it
migrated to eu.pythonanywhere.com – just let us know via email to support@pythonanywhere.com.
If you’d like to know more about what that means, read on…
Back in February, we announced eu.pythonanywhere.com. It’s a completely separate version of our site, with all of the computers and storage hosted in Frankfurt, rather than in the US like our other site at www.pythonanywhere.com.
Although our US-based systems are fully GDPR-compliant, thanks to the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework, we appreciate that some people are keen on keeping all of their data inside the EU so as to be sure that they comply with all regulations.
If you’re based in the EU, there’s almost no downside to using the new system. You will have the comfort of knowing your data is in the EU, and it’s closer to you in network terms (in our tests, the network latency is about 8ms from Amsterdam, versus 90ms to our US servers). For paid accounts, billing is in euros so you don’t need to worry about foreign exchange fees on your card payments. If we need to perform system maintenance on the servers, we’ll do it late at night European time, rather than during the early morning timeslot that we use for the US-based system. The only reason you might want to stick with the US system is that it’s a little cheaper; our underlying hosting costs are a bit higher for the EU service, which is reflected in the prices – a Hacker account that costs US$5/month on the US servers is €5/month on our new system (plus VAT if applicable).
The new system has a good number of users now and is functioning well. We’ve also been beta-testing a migration system that allows us to move accounts from the US system to the EU one with minimal downtime, and that is working well too :-)
So it’s time for us to take that migration system out of beta – if you have an account on www.pythonanywhere.com and would like it to be moved to eu.pythonanywhere.com, just let us know via email to support@pythonanywhere.com.
Let us know if you have any questions!