Iceland routing costs me half a second to US traffic — what else is privacy-sane and closer?

Not a complaint thread. The Icelandic host has been faultless for three years, takes crypto, collects almost nothing, and I would recommend it to most people reading this.

But my traffic is 70% US, and Iceland is a long way from anywhere on a route that goes through one of two cables. Median TTFB from US east is around 480ms against about 120ms from a Dutch box I use for something else. That is not the host's fault; it is geography.

Question: is there anything with a comparable privacy posture — crypto payment, minimal data collection, doesn't fold on a form complaint — that isn't on a rock in the North Atlantic? Or is the latency simply the price, and I should be putting a cache in front of it and shutting up?

It's the second one and you already know it.

480ms TTFB from US east isn't a routing problem you solve by moving the origin, it's a distance problem you solve by not making users talk to the origin. Put a cache in front, serve static from the edge, and the origin's location stops mattering for everything except the requests that genuinely need it.

FWIW the reason people don't do this is that the obvious edge providers are exactly the parties they moved to Iceland to avoid, which is a real conflict and not a stupid one. But there are edge options that aren't that, and my origin is in a privacy jurisdiction and my cache is somewhere fast is a coherent architecture. My origin is in a privacy jurisdiction and every user waits half a second is a worse one.

The conflict is exactly why I asked instead of doing the obvious thing. Putting the well-known edge in front of a privacy-jurisdiction origin hands one company the plaintext and the origin address, which is precisely what the origin choice was for.

Then say that in the first post. You asked a hosting question and the actual question is about the edge.

Depends what you're running, but on the plain question — Netherlands and Romania both have hosts with the same crypto-and-no-questions posture and neither is on a rock. The Dutch offshore tier, and the Romanian node of the Iceland/Finland/Romania operator, both come to mind.

You'd be trading a legal posture you probably aren't using for latency you definitely are. Whether that's a good trade depends entirely on whether anything you host has ever attracted more than a form email, and only you know that.

Half a second of TTFB was fine in 2014 and it's fine now for most of what people on this board actually run.

I'll take the unpopular side: if you're measuring TTFB on a site where the difference between 120 and 480 changes revenue, you're running a real business and you shouldn't be hosting it on a privacy rock in the first place. If you're not, then you're optimising a number because it's measurable, which is the oldest trap in this game.

Which one is it?

The first one, and that is a fair question rather than a rhetorical one.

It changes revenue measurably. Which means your own logic points at moving, and I have been reluctant because I like the current arrangement rather than because I can defend it.

Then move the origin to the Dutch box and keep the Icelandic one for the thing that actually needs Iceland.

There's no rule saying one stack. Half of this board's problems come from people who decided their entire operation had to share a threat model.

Two stack is correct answer. Everybody here run one stack and then complain about the stack.