Buying a Minecraft server as a European business
Where the data actually is, and the one thing that leaves the machine
Everything runs in one EU location and nowhere else: Lauterbourg in France, on AMD EPYC cores with NVMe storage. There is no location outside the European Union and no automatic failover to a second site, so residency here is a property of the architecture rather than a setting somebody has to remember to keep switched on. It is also a limit, and it belongs in the same paragraph as the guarantee: if a node has a bad day your server is not moved to another country, and everyone outside Europe pays the round trip on every request.
For a Minecraft server, the things a data protection officer asks about all sit in the same place. The world files, server.properties, the console and connection logs and the ban and whitelist files sit on the game node your server runs on, in Lauterbourg. The MySQL database included with the plan and the panel you log into to reach them run there too. Your server is not mirrored to a second continent for performance, because it is not mirrored at all.
The one copy that leaves the machine is our own system backup, and it is better to name it than to leave it implied. It runs nightly at 04:17 server time and covers the panel and billing databases and our system configuration, which hold your account details, while your world files stay on the node. Seven days are kept on the node itself, and the three most recent nights are copied off-site into Cloudflare R2 object storage. That off-site copy is our disaster recovery position rather than something you restore from; the backups in your panel, which you start or schedule yourself and which stay on the node with your server, are the ones you would use day to day. That bucket is created in Cloudflare's EU jurisdiction, so the objects themselves are stored in the European Union rather than crossing to the United States. Cloudflare Inc. is a US-incorporated company, which is a separate question from where the bytes sit, and our privacy policy commits us to appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses wherever a provider processes data outside the European Economic Area. If your assessment needs the storage jurisdiction stated in writing, ask and we will put it in writing, because it is a configuration setting we chose rather than something we have to go and find out.
- One EU location, Lauterbourg in France, and nothing outside the EU. That is a residency guarantee and a resilience limit at the same time.
- World files, console and connection logs and ban lists sit on the game node in Lauterbourg, France, as do the plan's MySQL database and the panel.
- Our own system backup (panel and billing databases, configuration) runs nightly at 04:17 server time: seven days on the node, the three most recent nights copied off-site to Cloudflare R2.
- Ask us in writing which providers are involved, and where the off-site copy is stored, before you commit rather than at your first audit.
Buying in the company name: invoices and the 0% reverse charge
Prices are the same number for everyone. There is no business tier and no VAT maths at checkout, so a company pays exactly what a consumer pays.
What changes for a company is the invoice. If your business is registered for VAT in an EU country other than Lithuania, ask for the reverse charge version: it is issued at the 0% rate, carries both VAT numbers and a reference to the reverse charge, and you account for the VAT yourself in your own return. The number has to be valid and in your company's name, because that is what makes the 0% rate correct in the first place. The detail people expect to go the other way is this one: the amount you pay does not change. Reverse charge changes how the tax is accounted for, not what leaves your bank account.
For a Lithuanian company the same total is invoiced with Lithuanian VAT at 21% shown separately on the face of the invoice. For a consumer, or a business that is not VAT registered, nothing changes at all.
The piece of advice that saves the most trouble is about whose name the account is in. Open it in the company's name, with the company's billing address and a billing email that outlives one employee, so that the invoice, the agreement and the panel account all point at the same legal person. An account opened in someone's personal name and expensed later is the version that produces an invoice your accountant queries. Invoices can be requested from the invoice request page or by email, including for a payment you have already made, and the form has a field for the order or payment reference.
- One price for everyone. Buying as a business changes the invoice, not the amount.
- EU business outside Lithuania with a valid VAT number: a 0% reverse charge invoice on request.
- Lithuanian company: the same total, with Lithuanian VAT at 21% shown separately.
- Open the account in the company's name from the start, so the invoice, the agreement and the panel account match.
What EU-owned and EU-operated means here, and where it stops
The phrase appears on enough hosting pages to have stopped meaning much, so here is what it means here, in facts you can check without asking us.
The company you contract with is MB VARIANTAI, a company registered in Lithuania, company code 306133252, VAT number LT100016340412, with its registered address in Trakai district. The company code and the VAT number are printed in the footer of every page on this site, and invoices are issued by the same company under the same VAT number, which means you can look the company up in the Lithuanian register and check the VAT number in VIES before you spend anything. The entity taking the payment, running the servers and answering your email is one and the same, under one jurisdiction. Our terms are governed by Lithuanian law, and the supervisory authority route for a complaint runs to the State Data Protection Inspectorate of Lithuania.
Where the phrase stops matters as much as where it starts. EU-owned and EU-operated describes the company and the hardware. It does not describe every provider in the chain, and no honest version of that claim does. Card payments run through Stripe and we never receive a full card number. This website is served through Cloudflare, which is also where the off-site backup copy lives. Analytics on the site are Google Analytics 4 and only run if you accepted the cookie banner, which is why declining it genuinely keeps them off. Stripe, Cloudflare and Google are US companies rather than EU ones. If your policy needs an EU-only supply chain end to end with no American provider anywhere in it, we are not that, and it is worth far more to know it now than during a review.
Being small has a shape too, and it is the same shape for a business customer as for anyone else. One region, with no second site to fail over to. A RAM change is a manual resize we do the same day you ask, during business hours, rather than a slider you can pull at three in the morning. If a launch date or a compliance deadline depends on capacity being ready on a particular day, tell us in advance rather than assuming.
- Contracting party: MB VARIANTAI, company code 306133252, VAT LT100016340412, Lithuania. Checkable in the register and in VIES.
- Lithuanian law governs the terms, and complaints route to the State Data Protection Inspectorate of Lithuania.
- The payment provider, the CDN and the analytics are US companies, and we would rather write that down than imply otherwise.
- EU only, no automatic failover between locations, and RAM changes are a same-day manual resize during business hours.