OneSignal’s Data Centers Are Moving to the EU!

Although we're headquartered in San Mateo, OneSignal has a presence on multiple continents and serves customers all over the world. We've built a healthy presence in the EMEA region, and we've often been asked for EU-based data centers in order to better serve our customers' needs for compliance with data residency, data sovereignty, and data localization.

We're excited to announce that we are moving data platforms and moving our data centers to the European Union to better ensure continuity in data flows and privacy protections.

Reevaluating Our Needs to Choose a New Data Platform

Here at OneSignal, we've historically been hosted on a "bare metal" environment. In order to affordably scale, our business required particularly fast NVME SSDs, or Solid State Drives, which weren’t available on public cloud offerings at the time.

Since we started on a bare metal environment six years ago, OneSignal has scaled rapidly and our initial providers helped us grow as quickly as we have. However, as our business needs have changed and as cloud providers have improved dramatically, we’ve decided to switch environments for greater flexibility.

After our engineering team thoroughly evaluated multiple providers on factors including the raw performance of each platform’s offerings and the total cost of ownership, we are delighted to announce that we've selected the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as our new provider.

Moving Our Data Centers to the EU

Alongside our decision to move data platforms, we’ve also decided to move our data centers to the EU. When this transition is complete, we will easily be able to accommodate our customers who prefer that their data remain in Europe for compliance reasons, without requiring additional work on their end.

Data Localization & GDPR Compliance

OneSignal is committed to helping our clients be GDPR compliant. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas and applies both to companies based in the EU and companies that transact with EU customers.

Easier Compliance For Our Customers

With our data center move to the EU, OneSignal customers will be able to better comply with GDPR. Although GDPR does not specify data localization requirements, many companies and some local laws have data localization requirements, such as the German localization law for telecom data. Keep in mind that after the invalidation of the Privacy Shield program in July 2020, the US is no longer included in the EU's adequacy decisions, which means that US-based companies with customers in the EU will also benefit from this move.

What Does This Mean for Our Customers?

Customers outside the EU shouldn’t notice any real difference from our current hosting. With our first-class infrastructure setup, we'll continue to pass on cost savings from our database architecture and tech stack to our customers. As a result, we don't foresee an impact when it comes to pricing.

Making the Transition on May 19, 2022 21:10 UTC

As a result of these changes, we expect OneSignal services to be temporarily unavailable due to scheduled maintenance during this process. Scheduled messages will be delayed during the move and resume sending when we're back, while API calls will return an error. We'll be posting updates to our status page throughout the transition.

In order to successfully migrate systems, we’ll need to copy our vast stores of data to their new home — a process that’s already begun. We'll be standing up replicas of all the services we currently have. Then, we'll quiesce the old data center, wait for all the changes to finish replicating to the new environment, and repoint our domains to hit the new environment.

We're very excited about the flexibility we'll be gaining with our new provider, and we're looking forward to easily scaling up our hardware needs with the rapid business growth we're experiencing.

Still have questions about our data centers? We're here to help