This article did not come out of nowhere. Someone asked me a simple question:

“Where do you host your site?”

Fair question. Annoyingly fair, actually.

I write a lot about Canadian sovereignty. If I am going to ask governments, companies and everyone else to look under the hood and account for their foreign dependencies, I should probably be willing to open mine.

So, here is the honest answer.

My website runs from a server in Beauharnois, Quebec. For quite a while, though, it ran on Vercel.

I had configured Vercel’s compute region for Montréal, so the problem was not simply where the application ran. The platform was still owned and controlled by an American company subject to U.S. law.

Sort of the point of this article. Nobody forced me to move it. Well, other than my growing desire to give American infrastructure and the U.S. CLOUD Act a small, entirely symbolic middle finger.

There was no outage, legal demand or dramatic late-night incident involving a server rack and three people in dark suits. This is my personal author website. If it disappeared for a day, several people might be mildly inconvenienced. Mostly me. But nobody’s pension would vanish.

I moved it because I have been writing about Canadian digital sovereignty while nearly every working part of my own project sat on American-controlled infrastructure.

That was getting a little too ironic, even for me.

Much of what I write about comes back to the same premise: people should own their identities and records. Leaving the application on a U.S.-controlled platform was convenient. Convenience had also become my excuse for ignoring the contradiction.

So I moved what I could.

What moved

The application runs on a virtual private server at OVHcloud’s Beauharnois data centre.

That includes the Next.js application, Postgres database, Redis cache and Umami analytics. Coolify handles deployment and container management. Traefik handles my routing. The application and the local data it generates now sit on Canadian soil.

Vercel was good to me. I did not leave because the product failed. It made deploying the site almost offensively easy, which helps explain why so much of the internet ends up concentrated on a handful of large platforms.

My concern was ownership and jurisdiction.

Vercel is an American company operating a global network. It offers a Montréal compute region, which I used, but the provider remains subject to U.S. law.

OVHcloud gives me a server physically located in Quebec. The company operates data centres in Canada, but its parent company is French. I have reduced my direct dependence on an American platform. I have not created a purely Canadian stack, and I am aware of the difference.

What did not move

My AT Protocol account and content repository remain on a Bluesky-hosted Personal Data Server. The website reads some of those records and displays them through the site.

Essentially, I moved the window; the Appview. The records behind it are still elsewhere.

Gander Social has been talking about Wingspan as Canadian AT Protocol infrastructure. The piece I am waiting for is a managed, Canadian-hosted PDS that I can migrate my account to.

If that arrives within a reasonable time, it is the most sensible destination. My records stay in Canada without making me personally responsible for keeping an identity service alive at 2:47 in the morning.

Self-hosting remains the fallback. But please, gawd, no.

I know I can run a PDS. That is unfortunately not the same as wanting to. It means owning the uptime, backups, account recovery, cryptographic keys, migrations and all the other cheerful little responsibilities that introduce themselves when I have little time as it is.

If I have to run one, I will. I’ll migrate carefully, test everything twice and keep enough coffee nearby to restart a small reactor.

But if a good managed Canadian option is coming, I would very much prefer the sovereign choice of letting somebody else get paged in the middle of the night.

Eurosky already offers European PDS hosting. Moving there would reduce my American dependency, and there would be nothing technically wrong with that choice. It simply solves a different problem. Moving my records from one foreign jurisdiction to another would not bring this particular project closer to Canadian sovereignty.

I would rather wait for infrastructure to be available that matches the goal.

How Canadian is Canadian enough?

I started with three rough categories.

  1. Canadian-owned and Canadian-hosted: Providers such as CanSpace, FullHost and VEXXHOST come closest to what I ultimately want, not cheap though.
  2. Foreign-owned and Canadian-hosted: This is where my OVHcloud server sits. The data is in Quebec. The parent company is in France. C’est la voie à suivre pour l’instant.
  3. U.S.-controlled infrastructure: An American provider remains subject to American legal authority even when it offers a Canadian hosting region. Just No.

Server location matters, but it does not settle the question.

Under the U.S. CLOUD Act, an American service provider can be compelled to produce data within its possession, custody or control even when that data is stored outside the United States. Legal limits and challenge mechanisms exist, but putting an American provider’s server in Montréal does not remove the American corporate relationship.

OVHcloud presents a different arrangement. Canadian law applies to the local operation and the data stored here, while ownership and ultimate corporate control remain French. It reduces the U.S. exposure I was concerned about without giving me complete Canadian ownership.

For a project this size, digital sovereignty means knowing where each dependency sits, who controls it and whether I have a practical way out.

OVHcloud is an improvement by that measure. It is also an intermediate step.

For the configuration I priced, the fully Canadian-owned options cost roughly two to three times more. The OVHcloud server came out close to what I had already been paying Vercel.

This was never much of a savings exercise. But I managed to change who controlled the application layer without blowing up the budget.

For now, that was enough to make the move worthwhile.

The dependencies that remain

The code still lives on GitHub.

GitHub does not serve the live website or handle reader traffic. If GitHub disappeared tonight, the running containers would keep doing their jobs. I would lose my normal deployment path until I restored the repository elsewhere.

That makes GitHub part of the deployment and software-supply chain rather than the live request path. Moving a git remote is comparatively easy, so it sits below the PDS in priority.

Email remains with Proton Mail in Switzerland. I chose Proton years ago for its privacy model. Canadian alternatives exist, but email migrations are tedious and I have successfully avoided surrendering a weekend to one. There is no grand strategy behind that decision. Sometimes inertia is just inertia.

I am also documenting the less visible pieces: the domain registrar, DNS, off-site backups, container images, package registries and monitoring.

A sovereignty assessment that carefully inventories the database while conveniently ignoring DNS would be excellent marketing and fairly useless engineering.

I have started moving some of the domain infrastructure to CanSpace. The rest will move as contracts and renewals come up, where a practical Canadian replacement exists. If circumstances become more urgent, so will the schedule.

This is still a work in progress.

What comes next

The PDS is the important move. I am waiting to see whether Gander’s Wingspan infrastructure provides a managed Canadian home for the account and its records. If that wait becomes unreasonable, I will run one myself, but ugh.

The remaining services will move according to risk and effort. Email hosted in Switzerland is lower on my list than identity records hosted by an American provider. GitHub is lower still because it can be replaced quickly and does not serve the running site.

I am not calling the website sovereign yet.

Its application layer runs in Quebec on infrastructure owned by a French company. Its identity records, source code and email still depend on providers in three other countries.

“Assembled in Canada” is probably the most accurate label.

This is less a declaration of independence than a change log:

  1. Completed: Moved the application and its local data off a U.S.-controlled platform.
  2. In progress: Documenting and moving the remaining domain infrastructure.
  3. Queued: Moving the PDS, email and source repository.
  4. Eventually: Running the application on Canadian-owned, Canadian-hosted infrastructure.

The website is more sovereign than it was before. I can defend that claim.

Even then, there is another layer beneath all of this: the route the traffic takes to reach the server. CIRA notes that many Canadian internet providers still rely on north-to-south transit through the United States. Depending on the networks involved, traffic between a Canadian reader and a Canadian server can still leave the country before coming back on a boomerang hop.

I can choose the host. I do not control every carrier’s peering agreements.

That deserves its own article, preferably after enough traceroutes to ruin an otherwise pleasant afternoon. For now, the site is assembled in Canada, with several foreign parts clearly marked on the box.

The current stack

  • Hosting: OVHcloud VPS
  • Deployment: Coolify with Docker and git-based deployments
  • Routing: Traefik
  • Application: Next.js 16
  • Database: Self-hosted Postgres
  • Cache and session storage: Redis
  • Analytics: Self-hosted Umami
  • Identity and content repository: Bluesky-hosted PDS
  • Source repository: GitHub
  • Email: Proton Mail
  • Domain infrastructure: Migration to CanSpace underway
  • Sovereignty status: Assembled in Canada; several foreign dependencies remain

Jason Butterfield is a Canadian sci-fi author, veteran, technology leader, and developer of Byline.pub. His fiction explores identity, power, ethics, and our uneasy relationship with technology. He is the author of Pejorative: Echoes of a Nation, and the forthcoming Simulacrum: Echoes of Humanity. He writes from Ontario, fuelled by coffee, dry humour, and a healthy distrust of unchecked systems.

Find his books and other articles at jasonbu.online