Why we moved to Estonia

The short version

In April 2021 our prior banking jurisdiction made running a cryptocurrency-friendly hosting business operationally impossible. Within ten weeks we had relocated the legal entity, rebuilt the data center in Tallinn, and migrated customer workloads. We inaugurated the new facility on 1 July 2021. The customer migration finished on 10 July.

That was the immediate cause. The longer answer is that Estonia turned out to be a strategically better home than the country we left, for reasons that took two more years to fully understand.

What forced the decision

We were a Turkish-incorporated company. By 2021 we had been operating dedicated email infrastructure for around six years and were among the first providers in the dedicated SMTP space to accept Bitcoin alongside credit cards and PayPal. A meaningful share of our recurring revenue came from cryptocurrency payments — not because we were ideologically attached to crypto, but because a chunk of our customer base preferred it and the operational mechanics worked.

On 30 April 2021, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey banned the use of cryptocurrencies in payments. The regulation went further than just retail; it created compliance friction for any business accepting crypto as a payment instrument under Turkish jurisdiction. Suddenly we were either going to stop accepting crypto, route everything through external payment handlers in foreign jurisdictions (a brittle setup), or move the business.

Five days later, on 25 April, we had committed to the move. We started the legal migration paperwork the same week. The data center reconstruction in Tallinn ran in parallel.

Why Estonia and not somewhere else

Several jurisdictions came up in the conversation. Estonia won on a combination of factors that, individually, looked like minor advantages and, together, looked like a different operating environment.

First, the e-Residency program. Estonia lets non-Estonian founders incorporate and operate Estonian companies remotely, with a full digital identity backbone. The administrative friction of relocation drops by an order of magnitude when you can sign documents from anywhere in the world with a state-issued cryptographic identity. For a small team executing a fast move, that mattered.

Second, EU membership. Estonia is fully bound by EU law — GDPR, NIS2, the broader regulatory stack. We had already been serving EU customers, but our jurisdiction at the time required us to negotiate adequacy and Standard Contractual Clauses for every enterprise procurement review. As an EU-incorporated entity, that whole layer of paperwork went away.

Third, the cryptocurrency regulatory environment. Estonia at the time had a workable, declared, audited framework for licensed crypto-related operations. The country has tightened the framework since 2022 (the licensing regime was reformed substantially), but the core fact remained true: it was possible to operate a regulated cryptocurrency-accepting business under Estonian law in a way that wasn't possible in our prior jurisdiction.

Fourth, technical infrastructure. Estonia has fiber connectivity that punches well above its country size, a small but capable data center industry, and proximity to the Nordic and German markets where most of our enterprise growth was coming from. Latency to Frankfurt and Stockholm from Tallinn is in the 20–40 ms range; latency to London is comparable.

What the new data center actually looks like

We rebuilt to a higher specification than what we had before. Two specific things changed materially:

Network redundancy. The Tallinn facility runs on a higher-capacity fiber backbone with redundancy provided by four independent fiber optic providers. This means that a failure in any single provider's network does not affect customer traffic. The previous setup had relied on two providers; expanding to four was the kind of upgrade that costs real money but pays back the first time you have a regional carrier outage.

Hardware tier. The relocation gave us the opportunity to standardize on current-generation enterprise hardware rather than progressively replacing aging machines in place. The current production fleet is built around HPE ProLiant servers (for high-density managed deployments where we want HPE's automation and security tooling) and Dell PowerEdge platforms with 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (for compute-heavy workloads where Dell's optimization made more sense for the workload profile).

For the technical specifications, see our data center page and infrastructure specifications.

What we underestimated about the move

In 2021 the move felt defensive. A regulation forced our hand. We executed the relocation because we had to, and the EU jurisdiction angle felt like a nice-to-have side benefit.

By 2024 the framing had inverted. The CLOUD Act conversation had become serious in EU enterprise procurement. NIS2 transposition was coming into force across member states. The Schrems II ruling had already invalidated Privacy Shield and was forcing companies to confront the reality that their US-based vendors carried jurisdictional risk that no DPA could fully neutralize. Suddenly being an EU-jurisdiction email infrastructure provider, with a real EU data center, with no parent company subject to foreign data access laws, was not a side benefit. It was the differentiator that mattered most when a German Mittelstand company or a Dutch healthcare network sat down to evaluate vendors.

The 2025 Microsoft email enforcement updates accelerated the same trend in a different direction. As deliverability standards tightened, customers wanted operators with deeper authentication expertise (DMARC, BIMI, MTA-STS, DANE), not just hosting capacity. Being headquartered in a jurisdiction that took digital governance seriously turned out to correlate with the kind of customer base that valued that depth of expertise.

What stayed the same

We still accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and other major cryptocurrencies alongside PayPal and credit cards. The payment options didn't change — just the jurisdiction that lets us offer them cleanly. Customers who paid us in crypto in 2018 still do; the experience is the same, the legal entity behind it is different.

The team did not significantly change. The engineers running PowerMTA clusters in 2020 are the engineers running them today. Customer relationships predating the move continued without renegotiation; we honored existing terms and migrated SLAs into the new entity without service disruption.

What changed is the contractual framing, the data residency claim, and the long-term strategic position. What stayed the same is the operational substance: dedicated email infrastructure operated by people who do this all day, available to senders who need it to work.