We’ve Moved to Iceland and Have a New Domain – Unseen.is

Greetings, everyone. Last night we completed the move of our servers to Iceland. We’ll be redirecting things there from now on. If you have any difficulties, be sure to clear the cache on your browser and shift-reload, being sure to reset any bookmarks for the new domain unseen.is. You’ll notice the spelling has changed from the archaic “unsene” spelling, which we started with because it was available and only $10. No sense spending a pile of money on a domain. The best news was the name with today’s spelling (Unseen.is) was also available in Iceland. Domains are a little more expensive there compared to the U.S., but many names are still available. That’s the advantage of a country with only 300,000 people!

We’re at the Thor Data Center run by Advania and we have three servers there now, though I expect that number will rapidly grow. Vinh and I personally visited Iceland and were very impressed with the technical and professional competence of everyone we met from our lawyers, accountants and bankers to the folks at the data center. So far, it’s been a very positive experience and we’re very excited for the future in Iceland.

Why Iceland?

We started the company in the U.S. in 2012 and things were going right on schedule until the Edward Snowden leaks. While most everything disclosed had already been leaked by previous whistleblowers, the public actually paid attention this time. As a result of these leaks, almost overnight no one trusted a U.S. based company. So because of customer demand, we decided to move all our servers, the company and bank account to Iceland.

We looked at different places to host our business and there were many possibilities outside the U.S. Nordic countries like Iceland, Norway and Sweden seem to have the best combination of “rule of law”, tolerance, many English speakers, infrastructure and very good privacy laws for your data, so we narrowed things down to those countries. Iceland is of course closer by several hours flying time than Scandinavia and it’s an air hub for transatlantic transportation.

The main reason we chose Iceland was because of the very good moral values of the people there. In 2002, premier Jiang Zemin of China visited Iceland and he was to be met with hundred of Falun Gong practitioners who were coming to protest the illegal persecution of Falun Gong in China. Millions of practitioners have been arrested, many beaten, tortured, murdered, some have even been the victims of live organ harvesting since the persecution began in 1999. Because of this injustice, hundreds of practitioners went to Iceland to protest this visit and make the Icelanders aware of the true situation in China.

However, the Chinese government convinced the government of Iceland at the time to block these protesters. Several hundred practitioners coming from the U.S., Canada and Europe were denied boarding their flights and dozens were detained in Iceland. The people of Iceland immediately saw through this and began to protest. Several thousand came to support the detained practitioners and in fact, this pressure on the then government eventually led to an issue of an apology for the treatment received by the Falun Gong practitioners.

Later, of course there was a significant banking crisis in Iceland that bankers wanted to have Iceland’s taxpayers to bail out. The politicians started out thinking this was a good idea, but eventually they stopped when Icelanders protested in the streets, banging pots and pans (hence the name “kitchen revolution”). The banks didn’t get their bailouts and to date, I can’t think of another country that has acted this way and stood up for what is right. These are the reasons we selected Iceland.

We believe the people of Iceland will stand with you, our customers. They enjoy their freedom and want you to have some too, even it it’s only your data. Enjoy your computer’s visit to Iceland!