Original guide

Cloud hosting deals sell a server location you cannot see until checkout

Answer first: The provider's own plan pages advertise where your site will live without naming a single country. The pricing page's plan comparison carries a row reading “Global data centers”. The cloud hosting page carries a block headed “Data centers worldwide”. The VPS page prints “Data centers worldwide” twice in its feature strip. None of the three pages names a country, a city or a region for the plan it is selling, and the cloud hosting page's eight-question FAQ never mentions a data centre or a server location. The names are published in the provider's own location article instead. For web and cloud hosting it lists ten countries — France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; India, Indonesia and Malaysia; the USA, broken out into Phoenix, Boston and Asheville; and Brazil. For VPS it lists nine, dropping the Netherlands and Asheville. For Agency hosting it lists five places, and for legacy cPanel hosting five countries with no cities. Whether you can change that choice, and what changing it costs you, is also published elsewhere and differs by product. Web and cloud hosting can change server location “once every 30 days”, and a transfer “can take up to 4 hours” during which the hosting panel is locked and the hosting IP changes. Agency hosting plans “do not support changing the server location after purchase”. A VPS location is “fixed after initial setup”, and moving means reinstalling, which “will permanently delete all existing data, including backups and snapshots”. For websites built with AI Builder, “the server location cannot be changed”. The provider also states that “data center availability is subject to change without prior notice” and that the only authoritative list is the one displayed in its dashboard during setup or a server transfer.

Published: 2026-09-30 00:06

What this guide adds

Sourced facts on this page are the location strings printed on the provider's plan pages, the place names and product-by-product lists in the provider's location article, the change cadence, transfer duration, panel lock, IP change, DNS propagation, temporary-domain and subdomain rules in the provider's transfer articles, the irreversibility statements for Agency, VPS and AI Builder, the availability and revertibility caveats, the renewable-electricity statement and the IP-database delay, each linked below. Clearly labelled derived arithmetic is limited to counts and one ratio drawn from published figures only: the count of six region tabs and the count of one tab rendered with place names and five served without panel content, read from the served markup; the count of three names in the rendered panel and of twelve named places in the web and cloud list, with nine of those twelve not appearing on the cloud hosting page; the count of ten countries for web and cloud, ten named places for VPS, five for Agency and five for legacy cPanel; the count of two places the VPS list drops from the web and cloud list; the count of six widget region tabs against the four continents the web and cloud list spans; and the ratio of a transfer of up to 4 hours to the 720 hours in the published 30-day minimum interval between changes. No price, latency figure, performance number, location count or transfer duration is estimated anywhere on this page; cells the provider does not publish are reported as unstated.

The location strings the plan pages actually print

Location is sold as a feature on every plan page, and on every plan page it is sold as a slogan rather than a place. The pricing page lists “Global data centers” as a plan feature row, sitting between the “99.9% uptime guarantee” row and the “Free automatic website migration” row in the comparison of the three cloud plans. The cloud hosting page devotes a whole block to it, headed “Data centers worldwide”, with the line “Select a data center location close to your target audience for faster loading times, at all times.” The VPS page repeats the same two words “Data centers worldwide” twice, once per copy of its feature strip, and adds a sentence further down: “Choose a server location close to your audience to boost loading speeds. We have data centers across North America, Europe, Asia, and South America.”

That sentence is the closest any plan page comes to describing the offer, and it describes it by continent. Four continents are named. Zero countries and zero cities are named. The same page carries a widget whose visible label is “Recommended server location:” followed by “Checking...” — the recommendation is produced in the browser, and the served markup publishes no recommendation at all.

The cloud hosting page's FAQ runs eight questions about what cloud hosting is, who should buy it, how migration works, what it costs and how to upgrade. The words “data center” and “server location” do not appear in any of the answers.

What the region widget renders, and what it leaves to JavaScript

The cloud hosting page's location block is a tabbed region selector. Six region tabs are served: North America, South America, Europe, South Africa, Asia and Australia. Only the first tab is rendered with place names in the HTML the server sends. Its panel is labelled “Locations in North America” and lists three names: Arizona, Massachusetts and New York. The other five tabs — South America, Europe, South Africa, Asia and Australia — are served as buttons with no panel content behind them, so the place names for five of the six regions exist only after JavaScript runs.

The block also carries one chip, “Locations with both Data Centers and CDNs”. That chip is a label on the list rather than a definition of it: it implies that some entries in the widget are data-centre locations, some are CDN locations, and some are both, without saying which entry is which. A reader who only sees the served page cannot tell whether Arizona, Massachusetts and New York are data centres, CDN points of presence, or both.

The published location list, product by product

The provider's location article is the page that names places, and it names a different set for each product.

Web and cloud hosting: Europe — France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Asia — India, Indonesia and Malaysia. North America — the USA, broken into Phoenix, Boston and Asheville. South America — Brazil. That is ten countries and twelve named places.

Agency hosting: Germany (Frankfurt), India (Mumbai), the USA (Phoenix and Boston), Brazil and the United Kingdom. That is five named places, and the same article states that changing the server location after the initial setup is not yet available for Agency plans.

VPS hosting, including KVM and Game Panel: Europe — France, Germany, Lithuania and the United Kingdom. Asia — India, Indonesia and Malaysia. North America — the USA (Phoenix and Boston). South America — Brazil. That is ten named places, and the article is explicit about what was removed: servers in the Netherlands and in Asheville are available for web and cloud plans only, not for VPS.

Legacy cPanel hosting: Lithuania, the United Kingdom, India, the USA and Brazil — five countries, no cities.

The same article names three locations that it does not put in any of those lists, because they are CDN rather than data-centre locations: Johannesburg (South Africa), Japan and Sydney (Australia).

Where the page and the list do not line up

Set the cloud hosting page's rendered panel beside the location list for the same product and the two do not describe the same set. The page names three US states: Arizona, Massachusetts and New York. The list names twelve places, three of them in the USA: Phoenix, Boston and Asheville. Two of the three page names line up with two of the three list names — Phoenix is in Arizona and Boston is in Massachusetts. The third page name, New York, does not appear in the web and cloud list at all, and the list names Asheville in its place.

The count of regions does not line up either. The widget offers six region tabs; the web and cloud location list spans four continents — Europe, Asia, North America and South America. The two extra tabs are South Africa and Australia, and those are exactly the regions the location article classifies as CDN rather than data-centre locations when it names Johannesburg and Sydney.

Counted as names rather than regions, nine of the twelve places the provider publishes for web and cloud hosting are not printed anywhere on the cloud hosting page itself.

This is a description of two provider-published pages, not a claim that either is wrong. The widget's own chip, “Locations with both Data Centers and CDNs”, shows that its list deliberately mixes two kinds of site, and the location article is the page that separates them. What a buyer cannot do is reconcile the two from the pages alone: nothing on the cloud hosting page says which of its names is a data centre and which is a CDN edge.

Changing your mind has a published cadence

The location article says a location can be selected during initial setup and that an active web or cloud plan can be moved from the Plan Details page in the dashboard. The separate transfer article supplies the rule the location article omits: the server location can be changed once every 30 days. That is the only rate limit the provider publishes for the change, and it appears on neither the pricing page nor the cloud hosting page.

The same article publishes the cost in time. A server transfer can take up to 4 hours to complete, and during that window the hosting panel is locked to prevent changes, with an explicit instruction not to make any changes during the process because registrations, new content and orders made directly on the website may not be preserved after the transfer completes.

Derived from those two published figures: 30 days is 720 hours, so a transfer of up to 4 hours occupies about 0.6% of the shortest interval the provider allows between two changes. The provider publishes no monthly, annual or per-change price for a transfer, so the money cost of using that allowance is unstated.

Three products where the choice is not reversible

For three of the products in the location list, changing the location after purchase is either unsupported or destructive, and none of the three deal pages says so.

Agency hosting: the location article states that changing the server location after the initial setup is not yet available for Agency hosting plans, and the transfer article repeats that Agency plans do not support changing the server location after purchase — the location is chosen only when setting up a new Agency plan. The published alternative is to buy a second Agency plan in the wanted location and use the cloning feature to move the website across, which means paying for two plans rather than moving one.

VPS hosting: the location is fixed after it is selected during setup. The transfer article describes the workaround as reinstalling the VPS in a different location, and both the transfer article and the dedicated VPS relocation article state that reinstalling in a new location will permanently delete all existing data, including backups and snapshots, and that a full backup should be downloaded beforehand. The VPS page itself advertises free weekly backups and snapshots as a plan feature, and those are among the items the relocation article says are destroyed by the move.

AI Builder websites: the transfer article states that websites created with AI Builder have integrated CDN features by default and therefore the server location cannot be changed. The AI Builder location article explains the same thing from the other direction — the site's assets are served through the provider's own CDN, which it describes as the default and only CDN option for AI Builder sites. For those sites the location question is answered by removing the choice rather than by publishing one.

What a transfer does to your site, your IP and your DNS

The transfer article publishes a list of side effects that a location change carries, and none of them appears on a deal page. The hosting IP changes, and the provider emails the new value when the transfer finishes. A domain pointed at the provider by A record must have that record updated by hand; a domain pointed by nameservers is updated automatically. Any remote connection, API or script that depends on the IP must be updated manually too.

The website and email may temporarily stop working while the change propagates through DNS, which the article says takes a few hours to complete. A temporary domain of the form yoursite.hostingersite.com stops working after the transfer, so a site that has not yet been connected to its real domain needs that connection finished first or redone afterwards. Subdomains that use custom A records are not updated automatically even when the domain uses the provider's nameservers, and each of those A records has to be pointed at the new IP by hand.

Read together with the published cadence, the practical shape of the offer is this: the change is possible on web and cloud plans, at most once every 30 days, and each use of it carries an IP change, a locked panel for up to 4 hours, a DNS propagation window during which the site and email may not respond, and a manual DNS checklist. None of that appears beside the “Global data centers” row.

The provider's own caveat about the list

The location article ends its list with two notes that qualify everything above it. Data centre availability is subject to change without prior notice, and the final list of available locations is the one displayed in the provider's dashboard during the setup or server transfer process. Locations available during initial setup are subject to future capacity constraints, and a user who changes server location may be unable to revert to the original selection.

Two consequences follow from those sentences as published. The list on the location article is not a guarantee of what will be offered at checkout, by the provider's own statement. And a change is not necessarily reversible: the provider says a user may be unable to go back to the location they started in, which turns a change made for a temporary reason into a possibly permanent one.

The same article states a separate, non-technical commitment about the data centres themselves: all of the provider's data centres have their electricity use matched with 100% renewable electricity, achieved either by the provider or by its colocation partners through supply contracts and power purchase agreements, or through renewable electricity certificates including European Guarantees of Origin, North American Renewable Energy Certificates and International Renewable Energy Certificates. That claim is about the electricity behind the sites, not about where they are, and it is the only environmental statement the location article makes.

What remains unstated

Several cells a buyer would want are simply not published anywhere on the pages read for this article, and they are reported here as unstated rather than estimated.

There is no published price for a server transfer, so the cost of using the once-every-30-days allowance is unknown. There is no published latency figure, response-time target or performance guarantee tied to any named location, so the speed benefit the pages promise is not quantified. There is no published mapping from a plan tier to a subset of locations, so whether every cloud plan can reach every one of the twelve web and cloud places is unstated. There is no published number of data centres behind any single country. And there is no published statement reconciling the widget's third North American name with the location list's third US city.

One more cell is unstated for a different reason: the IP-location article explains that public IP lookup databases often show the wrong location for a provider's addresses, that the provider publishes a geofeed to correct this, and that public databases may take up to two months to catch up. So a third-party IP lookup is not a reliable way to check which location a plan was actually placed in — the provider's own dashboard is.