Region status • Canada
Hostim has no Canadian servers. One live region, in Falkenstein, Germany. A US East region in New Jersey is under consideration and would serve Toronto and Montreal at 12 to 15 ms — but New Jersey is not Canada, and no amount of low latency makes it Canadian storage.
Most pages about Canadian hosting sell you a Canadian data centre without asking whether you need one. That question has a real answer, and for a lot of Canadian teams the answer is no. This page gives you the answer first and the pitch second.
These get treated as one question and they are not. Answer this one first, because it decides whether you should be reading this page at all.
Your contract, your provincial rules or your customers require it. Nova Scotia public bodies do by statute. Parts of the Quebec public sector do. Many BC public bodies still do by internal policy even though the law changed in 2021. If you are here, Hostim cannot serve you and you want a Canadian provider — OVHcloud Beauharnois, Vultr Toronto, a Canadian managed host. Say so on the form anyway; it is the number that would justify building.
No legal requirement, you just do not want a 150 ms round trip. This is most Canadian SaaS and most agency work. Here the question is only how many milliseconds, and a New Jersey region would give Toronto and Montreal better numbers than a Vancouver host does. The German region today is 85 to 100 ms to central Canada, which is workable for dashboards and APIs and poor for anything chatty.
PIPEDA does not require Canadian storage. It requires you to stay accountable for the data, to get comparable protection by contract, and to be open with customers that processing may happen abroad. A large share of "we need Canadian hosting" is this case. Worth ten minutes with your own policy before it costs you a provider choice.
Falkenstein is our live region and those are real round trips. New Jersey is a region that does not exist, so those are typical figures for that metro, not measurements of ours. Treat them as an estimate with no promise behind them.
| From | Falkenstein, Germany (live today) | New Jersey (planned, expected) |
|---|---|---|
| Toronto | ~100 ms | ~15 ms |
| Montreal | ~95 ms | ~12 ms |
| Ottawa | ~100 ms | ~16 ms |
| Halifax | ~85 ms | ~25 ms |
| Winnipeg | ~125 ms | ~40 ms |
| Calgary | ~145 ms | ~55 ms |
| Vancouver | ~155 ms | ~70 ms |
One thing worth saying plainly: a New Jersey region would serve Toronto and Montreal better than a Vancouver data centre would. Canada is wide. "Hosted in Canada" and "fast for Canadians" are not the same claim, and a Toronto host is 60 to 70 ms from Vancouver either way.
This is a summary, not legal advice. Check it against your own obligations before you rely on it.
| Rule | Who it binds | Requires storage in Canada? |
|---|---|---|
| PIPEDA (federal) | Private-sector organisations across Canada | No — accountability and comparable protection, not localisation |
| Quebec Law 25 | Private sector operating in Quebec | No — but a privacy impact assessment is required before a transfer |
| Nova Scotia PIIDPA | Public bodies and their service providers | Yes — stored and accessed only in Canada |
| Quebec public sector | Public bodies and their suppliers | Yes, in the parts that carry the requirement |
| BC FIPPA, since Bill 22 (25 Nov 2021) | BC public bodies | No longer by statute — many still require it by internal policy |
The pattern is that Canadian residency is a public-sector rule that private companies inherit when they sell to the public sector. If you are a Canadian startup selling to other companies, you almost certainly do not have a residency obligation — you have a disclosure obligation, which is a different and much cheaper thing.
There is a second-order point that cuts the other way. Hostim is a German company with German servers, so it is not subject to the US CLOUD Act. A Canadian subsidiary of a US provider generally is. If your concern was foreign government access rather than the letter of a residency clause, an EU processor may be a better answer than a Canadian data centre owned in Seattle.
Same platform in either region. The region only changes where the disk is and how far the packet travels.
Push an image, connect a repo, or paste a docker-compose.yml. No proprietary manifest to learn.
PostgreSQL, MySQL and Redis, provisioned and backed up, inside the plan price rather than billed per gigabyte.
From €2.50/month. Reserved CPU, RAM and storage. Traffic spikes do not change the invoice, which is the part most Canadian teams are actually shopping for.
Long-lived processes, not request-scoped functions. Background workers, WebSockets and cron survive between requests.
Certificates issued and renewed for you. Point the record, get a working domain.
Live logs and graphs out of the box, plus a bastion when you need to get inside the container.
The form asks one question that matters: would New Jersey work, or does your data have to stay inside Canada? Those are two different builds at two different costs, and we count them separately so a Canadian-residency requirement is never absorbed into a general "North America" number and quietly ignored.
Hostim is small and self-funded. A second region is a real monthly cost that has to be paid by people who actually want it, so we ask before we build rather than building and hoping. A demand threshold was written down before any of these pages went live, and we review against it rather than moving it afterwards. Signups from customers who already pay us count for more than anonymous ones.
Platform figures from the published price list, docs and our own benchmark.
€2.50/month
Hostim entry app plan
Plan sa-1-1: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM. Flat price, billed hourly, no usage meter.
€0
Managed database free tier
PostgreSQL 256 MB, MySQL 256 MB, Redis 128 MB, volume 1 GB. No cap on how many free instances you create.
Included on every plan
Database high availability
PostgreSQL and MySQL run as a primary plus hot standby with automatic failover, shared plans included.
2,708 TPS
Managed PostgreSQL write throughput
pgbench, 4 clients, 300 s, plan drp-50 (2 vCPU / 4 GB). AWS RDS db.t4g.medium scored 1,080 TPS on the same test.
€0/GB
Traffic charges
No ingress fees and no per-GB egress line on app plans.
1 today (Falkenstein, Germany)
Regions
Bare metal, EU only, with more regions planned. No AWS, GCP or Azure underneath.
“Managed PostgreSQL runs as a replicated cluster with automatic failover on every plan, shared and dedicated alike.”
— Hostim.dev docs, managed PostgreSQL
No. Hostim runs one live region, on bare metal in Falkenstein, Germany. There is no Canadian data centre and none is planned. A US East region in northern New Jersey is under consideration, and New Jersey is not Canada.
Not in Canada itself. You can deploy to the German region today, which works for Canadian users at roughly 85 to 155 ms depending on the province. If your requirement is latency, that may already be acceptable. If your requirement is that the data physically sits in Canada, Hostim cannot meet it and you should use a Canadian provider.
No. PIPEDA has no data localisation requirement. A Canadian private-sector business can use a foreign processor as long as it stays accountable for the data, uses comparable protection by contract, and tells customers that data may be processed outside Canada. Residency rules in Canada come from provincial public-sector law, not from PIPEDA.
Mainly public-sector bodies and their suppliers. Nova Scotia's PIIDPA requires personal information held by public bodies to be stored and accessed only in Canada. Parts of the Quebec public sector have equivalent requirements, and Quebec Law 25 obliges a privacy impact assessment before any transfer outside the province. British Columbia repealed its blanket residency rule in Bill 22, in force 25 November 2021, so BC public bodies now decide by their own policy rather than by statute — many still require Canadian storage. Private-sector SaaS under PIPEDA generally does not.
For latency, yes — Toronto and Montreal are 12 to 15 ms from northern New Jersey, which is better than most Canadian teams get from a Vancouver or Calgary host. For residency, no. New Jersey is US soil and brings the US CLOUD Act with it. If your rule says Canada, a US region does not satisfy it, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Law 25 is Quebec's modernised private-sector privacy law, phased in from 2022 to 2024. It requires a privacy impact assessment before personal information is communicated outside Quebec, and the transfer only proceeds if the assessment shows adequate protection. It does not ban foreign hosting, but it makes it a documented decision rather than a default one. Hostim being a German company under GDPR is usually helpful in that assessment rather than harmful.
Only if enough people say they need one. The waitlist on this page asks a direct question: whether New Jersey would work for you, or whether your data has to stay inside Canada. Those are two different builds with two different costs, so they are counted as two different answers. Today the Canadian-storage count is what would justify a Canadian region, and it is not close.
HOSTIM.DEV UG, a German company, under German and EU law. For a Canadian customer that means your processor is subject to GDPR and is not subject to the US CLOUD Act. Whether that is better or worse than a Canadian provider depends entirely on which rule you are trying to satisfy.