If your SaaS handles personal data belonging to EU citizens, the physical location of your servers — and the legal jurisdiction of the company that owns them — is a core compliance question, not a minor infra detail.
Data residency vs. data sovereignty
These two terms get conflated constantly:
- Data residency: your data is physically stored within a given country's borders.
- Data sovereignty: which legal jurisdiction actually governs that data, and who can compel its disclosure.
AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure can give you EU data residency by letting you pick a Frankfurt availability zone. What they can't give you is EU data sovereignty - because they're US-incorporated companies, and therefore still subject to the US CLOUD Act, which can compel them to hand over data to US authorities regardless of where it's physically stored. That directly conflicts with how GDPR treats data transfers outside the EU.
Why Frankfurt specifically
- Germany's own privacy law (BDSG) goes beyond GDPR's baseline.
- Frankfurt is the EU's financial capital, so its data centers are built to extremely high physical security and redundancy standards.
- It's home to DE-CIX, one of the largest internet exchange points in the world, with peak throughput over 19.6 Tbps.
That last point matters for performance, not just compliance - DE-CIX means direct peering with thousands of networks, translating to under 15ms latency to most major European tech hubs.
The fix
Independent, EU-owned bare metal dedicated servers hosted in Frankfurt give you both data residency and data sovereignty, since the entity controlling the hardware isn't subject to the CLOUD Act in the first place.
Full write-up, including a latency benchmark table and hardware checklist (NVMe, unmetered bandwidth, hardware DDoS protection, isolated VLANs), is here:
