Lately we have been getting a lot of inquiries about where we do our actual conversion. These inquiries are mostly related to data protection laws in the jurisdiction of the person or company inquiring about this.
Ever since ‘cloud computing’ has become popular, more and more companies are concerned that it’s no longer clear where their data resides and this has led governments to institute data protection laws that make sure that data is only processed in the area that it’s supposed to be processed. Whoswholegal.com did a really nice post about it here.
Now some time ago we activated servers in Asia and Europe, on top of the servers we already had in the USA. We did this primarily to reduce latency for customers in continents other than the North American continent. But we soon came to realize that it also fulfilled a need to have access to servers, which are sure to be in a geographical area, just for the purpose of data protection.
Therefore we want to clarify in this post what we actually do to ensure that your data is processed in the area that you want it to be processed.
When you register for our service the process is as follows:
- Your subscription data (name, email, plan type, default settings etc) is propagated to all our servers
and access to all conversion servers is immediately granted - For each of the services that we have, you choose the server that you want to use for the conversions by choosing the right ‘service call’. Your data will only arrive at a server in that geographical location and it will NEVER be shared with any other location. It will also be automatically deleted after a maximum of 2 hours.
Here’s how this works for our different services:
- For the ‘save as PDF’ functionality you just link to the server area, in which you want to convert. For example, if you want our European servers to convert you link to http://europe.htm2pdf.co.uk/display (see http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/save-as-pdf/)
- With the API you can choose the API call that represents the server of choice. In case you’re using a dedicated server or a special shared server, then you use that one. In case you want to use for example our Asian conversion server then you would call the API at http://api.htm2pdf.co.uk/urltopdf (see http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/html-to-pdf-api)
- When you use our PHP SDK to create PDFs you can use a simple PHP statement to set the server of choice. For example, you can use $pdf->SetServer(‘usa’) if you want to make sure you’re using our American servers.
Hopefully this post has shown you how we make sure your data only goes to the area of choice. Of course this is also valid in case you sign up for an enterprise plan, because we would then discuss the location of your dedicated or shared server with you.
As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions you may have!