Hello everyone,
Apologies for the lack of notice, and the resulting downtime yesterday. I was relocating the server from the US to the EU and although it went smoother than it could have done, it didn't go as smooth as I would have liked.
Anyway, the reason for this is largely to protect your data. There are many diaries on the site, most of which are now private diaries. The information within is nobodies business but the author of each individual diary. The various jurisdictions around the world (i.e. USA, EU, UK, etc) have varying degrees of privacy protection enshrined in their individual laws and the general consensus is that data will fall under the law of where-ever the data is stored.
Thus, if the server is located in the US, the data will be subject to US law regarding data privacy and data access. Until January this year that did not overly concern me as the data privacy laws of the US were roughly in line with the rest of the world. However, there has been a major shift in attitude towards "minorities" (I use the term loosely) in the US Administration and I can't risk that someday a member of said administration may require your data in order to determine your sexual orientation, surgery you may have had in the past, settled status of the country you're in, or who you vote for and then use that information against you.
This may seem drastic, it may seem paranoid. Being concerned about having to register as Jewish in the Netherlands in 1940 probably seemed paranoid at the time too. After all, if you've nothing to hide and all that. I hope my concerns are unfounded and indeed paranoid.
I hope that moving the server to the EU doesn't overly impact the speed of the service for our US friends - but please do let me know if it does and I will see what can be done to mitigate that. From a data perspective though, the EU GDPR is extremely rigid and provides very high levels of protection for individuals regarding who can see and use the data.
I don't do this lightly, and I don't do this to make any political point whatsoever. The safety of DearDiary.Net users' data is my only concern.