Railyard
Built in Canada

Data residency is about geography. Sovereignty is about ownership.

Putting a server in Montréal is easy. Putting it beyond the reach of a foreign government is a different question, and it depends on who owns the company holding your data — not the city the rack sits in. Railyard runs on any Linux machine, which means you can answer that question however you need to.

See CAD pricing Compare the options
The part most vendors skip

Why "Canadian region" and "outside US jurisdiction" are not the same sentence.

The US CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, allows American authorities with valid legal process to compel a US-based provider to produce data in its possession, custody or control — regardless of which country that data is stored in.

AWS, DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode are all American companies. Their Canadian regions genuinely keep your bytes on Canadian soil, which satisfies a contract clause written in terms of location. What a Canadian region does not do is change whose courts can reach the company holding them.

Whether that matters depends entirely on your situation. For a marketing site, it does not. For a clinic's records, a law firm's files, or a public-sector contract, it can be the whole requirement. Railyard's position is simply that you should be able to see the difference and choose deliberately.

Not legal advice. Jurisdiction is contested, fact-specific, and changes with the caselaw. This page describes the technical shape of the problem so that counsel has something concrete to assess. Have them confirm anything you intend to rely on.

Four levels

Pick the level of independence the work actually needs.

Railyard deploys identically to all four. The pipeline does not care who owns the machine.

Your own hardware

Machines you own, in a facility you chose. Subject to Canadian law and nobody's corporate parent.

Canadian-owned provider

A company headquartered in Canada, so Canadian law is the only jurisdiction in play.

Non-US provider

A foreign parent outside US jurisdiction. No CLOUD Act exposure, but not Canadian either.

US-owned, Canadian region

The data sits in Canada, but the parent company is American and can be compelled under US law.

Provider Parent company Region Location Jurisdiction
Your own hardware You any Any Canadian rack or colo Your own hardware
Vexxhost Canada ca-ymq-1 Montréal, Québec Canadian-owned provider
ThinkOn Canada multiple Toronto and Vancouver Canadian-owned provider
OVHcloud France bhs Beauharnois, Québec Non-US provider
AWS United States ca-central-1 Montréal, Québec US-owned, Canadian region
DigitalOcean United States tor1 Toronto, Ontario US-owned, Canadian region
Vultr United States yto Toronto, Ontario US-owned, Canadian region
Linode / Akamai United States ca-central Toronto, Ontario US-owned, Canadian region

Region names and corporate ownership change — confirm both with the provider before relying on them for a compliance obligation.

Why Railyard can offer this at all

A platform that owns servers can only ever sell you its own.

The agent only needs a Linux box

Attach anything you can SSH into — a Canadian-owned cloud, a European provider, or a machine in your own building. There is no supported-providers list to be trapped inside.

Moving is a configuration change

If a provider's ownership, pricing or politics change, attach a new server elsewhere and deploy to it. Your applications are ordinary containers, not a proprietary runtime.

A bill that doesn't move with the dollar

USD-denominated tooling gets quietly more expensive every time the exchange rate shifts. A CAD subscription costs the same in March as it did in January.

Questions

Sovereignty, answered plainly.

Isn't AWS in Montréal already Canadian data residency?
The data is physically in Canada, which satisfies a residency requirement written purely in terms of location. It does not put the data outside American jurisdiction: the US CLOUD Act reaches records in the possession, custody or control of a US-headquartered provider regardless of where they are stored. If your concern is where the bytes are, a Canadian region is enough. If your concern is who can compel access to them, it is not.
So what actually gets me out from under US jurisdiction?
A provider whose parent company is not American — a Canadian-owned host such as Vexxhost or ThinkOn, a non-US foreign provider such as OVHcloud, or hardware you own outright in a Canadian facility. Railyard runs on all of them, because the agent only needs a Linux machine and SSH access.
Can I still use AWS or DigitalOcean if I want to?
Yes, and plenty of teams should. They are excellent, cheap and well documented, and for most workloads the jurisdiction question is not the deciding factor. Railyard simply makes the trade-off visible instead of hiding it, and lets you move later without re-platforming.
Where does Railyard's own control plane run?
The hosted control plane runs on Canadian infrastructure and stores only operational metadata — server names, deploy history, audit entries — never your application's data. Teams that need the metadata inside their own jurisdiction too can run the control plane themselves on the self-hosted plan.
Does paying in CAD mean the price moves with the exchange rate?
No. Your subscription is denominated in Canadian dollars, so the number on the pricing page is the number on your invoice regardless of where the dollar sits that month.

Deploy somewhere you actually control.

Attach a Canadian-owned host, a European provider, or your own hardware. Railyard installs the agent and the pipeline works the same on all of them.

Attach your first server See how a deploy runs

Free for one server, forever. No credit card.