GDPR Compliant Hosting Providers

Do you own a website or an eCommerce store that collects the data of your users belonging to the European Union? Then you are required to comply with the GDPR law as soon as possible. But, what are the steps required to comply with the law? There are several articles and guidelines from the GDPR itself to educate you about the process. But that alone won’t do. Your website will only be fully compliant if your hosting provider is compliant as well.

A web host has access to a great deal of data on your website. There is your personal data that you share with your host and the information that you store on their servers which belongs to your customers/visitors’. Hence, you can’t afford to host your website with a non-compliant one, putting your customers’ information at risk. Thus, here is a list of all the GDPR compliant hosting providers to choose from, which you can completely trust with your data.

HostPapa is one of the best few hosting providers out there who took necessary steps as early as possible to comply with the GDPR norms, once it became mandatory for all online platforms that store the data of EU citizens to comply with the law. Their updated privacy policy has covered everything required by the GDPR law.

It informs you regarding all the information they collect, how they use it, where they store it along with the steps HostPapa takes to protect the data. They have even included their contact information within their privacy policy to make it easy to contact them. HostPapa has specifically mentioned in their privacy policy how they handle the information as both the data controller and data processor and how they use cookies on their websites.

HostPapa is one of the most popular web hosting providers available to host small websites. Their fast hosting service provides you with a free domain name, easy-to-use tools along with fast and reliable storage and apps. They offer a wide variety of email plans for you to choose from as per your business requirements. You can easily set up a website with their website builder and choose the right custom domain in only 60 seconds.

With an incredible support team, user-friendly control panel, and enhanced security features HostPapa is worth a shot to host your business and to be GDPR compliant.

Cloudways is a GDPR compliant managed hosting service provider based in Europe. It is known for providing customers with convenient hosting solutions while keeping their websites secure at all times.

The Privacy Policy clearly mentions the data collection procedure they use, how they maintain the security of user data, and how they share the data as per the requirements of GDPR rules. The user rights (as defined by GDPR) and all parameters of user consent are defined clearly as well.

Cloudways does not collect any data without customer consent. Additionally, the customers are entitled to the right to withdraw their consent at any time. This provision is an important GDPR policy requirement.

Cloudways users have the choice of five industry-leading IaaS providers including AWS, GCE, Vultr, Linode, and DigitalOcean. Similarly, all major PHP-powered applications including WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and Laravel are supported by the platform. Additional features include performance-optimized PHP-ready servers, Free SSL certificates, CloudwaysCDN, real-time server monitoring, and off-site server backup storage features.

Thus, Cloudways is one of the best-managed cloud hosting service providers for small and medium-sized organizations (SMEs), agencies, bloggers, and e-commerce businesses who prefer a GDPR compliant hosting provider.

Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider and is fully GDPR compliant. They’ve put a lot of effort into revisiting each of their policies regarding data processing, collection, and storage. Kinsta is powered by Google Cloud Platform which is fully GDPR compliant, hence they’ve reviewed all their third-party vendors and integrations to arrange for similar GDPR-ready data processing agreements.

Additionally, the team behind Kinsta decided to build their own GDPR cookie consent plugin, which allows visitors to customize everything based on scripts and cookies have running.

Kinsta is a great choice for big or small businesses or blogs with increased traffic. They guarantee blazing fast site speed and smooth running of each WordPress site hosted with them. Kinsta’s advanced security features include daily uptime checks, automatic backups, free SSL, DDoS attack detection, malware scanning, and hack fix guarantee.
Other features include free migrations, free CDN, use of the latest PHP versions, 24/7 expert support, 20 worldwide data centers to choose from, WooCommerce optimized server environment, one-click staging environments, and a custom-designed site management dashboard. You can see all Kinsta features here.

Siteground is another web host you can completely rely on in terms of GDPR compliance. They have made sure that each rule put forward by the GDPR is strictly obeyed by them. In their privacy policy, they have clearly stated the steps they have taken to comply with the law. It includes information regarding the data they collect, how they share the data, and who they share it with, etc.

They have also explained how they handle their responsibility as a data processor when it comes to their customers storing data on the Siteground’s servers. In this regard, they ensure transparent security measures, minimum access to the data, providing access to only secured partners, and timely disclosure of personal data breach, etc.

Siteground is an excellent choice for hosting small to medium sites and a great provider of managed WordPress hosting. Its managed WordPress plan includes WordPress installations, automated migrations, automatic updates, advanced caching, and WordPress support.

WP Engine is another member of the GDPR compliant web hosts list. Their privacy policy states what personal data they collect (customer-provided information, data from web server logs, cookies, and information collected by WP Engine’s customers) how they collect it, how they use the personal data, criteria for disclosure to third parties, and how they protect the user’s data, etc.

In addition to the GDPR, WP Engine is also in compliance with the EU-US and Swiss-US privacy shield framework formed by the US Department of Commerce, European Commission, and the Swiss Administration. According to the website of the Privacy Shield Framework “The EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks were designed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the European Commission and Swiss Administration, respectively, to provide companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union and Switzerland to the United States in support of transatlantic commerce”.

WP Engine is the ideal choice for managed WordPress hosting. Within its hosting plan, you will have access to over 36 premium themes, built-in SEO, and security to easily build a highly functional website. If you are looking forward to moving to a new web host WP Engine would be a great choice since their auto migration plugin can do it in just a few clicks.

Additional benefits include the facility to easily move data between your cloud development environments, tools to carry out rapid testing of changes in order to shorten development cycles, free CDN and SSL certificates, automated backups, and more.

Flywheel is another important hosting provider who has managed to comply with the GDPR. Its privacy policy has come up with a new update to let you know what steps they have taken to protect your data and to comply with the GDPR.

Flywheel’s enhanced email settings allow users to select the specific types of messages they want to receive and have set up an internal infrastructure to ensure all the GDPR-related requests are responded appropriately. The flywheel has also declared that they will never sell, rent, or lease your information including name, address, email, etc to any third-party.

This web host is one of the best solutions to host freelancer or agency type websites. It provides your sites with great speed and lets you easily add a CDN for giving your site further boost. You can choose the data centre closest to you or your visitors and avail free SSL certificates right from Flywheel’s dashboard thereby avoiding any third-party providers. Besides all these, you can also benefit from Hacker-free security, easy SFTP access, nightly site backups, and much more powerful features by hosting your website with Flywheel.

It is important for the security and growth of your website/business that you check up on your hosting provider’s GDPR compliance status and making sure that it is fully complied. If the status is found to be non-compliant you shouldn’t hesitate to move to a compliant host as soon as possible. This will ensure the security of your users’ data and add credibility to your website among its users.