On August 22, the United States imposed 50% tariffs on a broad range of Canadian goods. On September 8, Canada’s counter-tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of American products take effect.
Canadians have spent the past year and a half responding in a practical way: checking labels, switching brands, and buying Canadian when a Canadian alternative exists.
Most businesses have not applied the same thinking to their website.
Hosting will never appear on a tariff list because tariffs apply to goods, not services. But if your website is hosted by an American company, you are still sending money to the United States every month and keeping your business data under US jurisdiction. And unlike changing a supply chain, changing your web host is something you can usually do in a day.
First, find out who actually hosts your website
A surprising number of business owners do not know.
If someone built your website years ago, the hosting may still be billed to a card on file with a company you have not thought about since. Check your credit card statement or search your inbox for words like “renewal,” “hosting,” or “invoice.”
Three things matter: who owns the hosting company, where your data is physically stored, and what currency you are being billed in.
If you’re with a US host, your money and your data are both tied to the US
GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, DreamHost, Namecheap, Squarespace, Wix, and Amazon Web Services are all American companies.
Every renewal payment ultimately leaves Canada. Your website files, customer information, and often your email are stored on infrastructure controlled by an American company and subject to American law.
For most businesses, that was not much of a concern a few years ago. It looks different today, with Canada and the United States in an open trade dispute and both governments imposing tariffs on one another.
A US company “operating in Canada” is still a US company
This is where things get confusing.
GoDaddy has a Canadian storefront and Canadian pricing. GreenGeeks operates infrastructure in Montreal. Amazon has cloud regions in Montreal and Calgary.
But having servers in Canada does not make the company Canadian.
Under the US CLOUD Act, American companies can be required to provide data to US authorities even when that data is stored outside the United States. A Montreal data centre operated by a US company can provide Canadian latency, but the company controlling the data is still American, and the revenue still flows to an American business.
Ottawa has recognized that distinction in its push toward sovereign cloud services, where Canadian ownership and control matter alongside the physical location of the servers. Washington has also identified Canada’s data sovereignty policies as a trade concern.
The important question is not simply where the server sits. It is who owns and controls the company behind it.
Check the currency on your invoice
The trade dispute has also put pressure on the Canadian dollar, which is hovering just above 70 US cents.
If your hosting company bills in US dollars, every renewal costs significantly more once converted into Canadian currency. Many Canadian credit cards also add a foreign transaction fee of around 2.5%.
That means your hosting service does not need to raise its prices for your bill to go up. Exchange rates can do it for them.
A Canadian hosting company that bills in Canadian dollars removes that variable. The amount on the invoice is the amount you pay, regardless of what happens to the loonie.
The bottom line: this is one of the easy switches
A manufacturer cannot rebuild an international supply chain overnight.
Moving a website is different.
A typical migration involves transferring or updating the domain, moving the website files and databases, migrating email if necessary, and updating DNS. In many cases, the entire process can be completed within a day or two without visitors noticing anything has changed. A competent Canadian hosting provider should also handle most of the technical work for you.
If you have been looking for practical ways to keep more of your business spending and data in Canada, your website is an easy place to start.
Not because a tariff is forcing you to, but because there is very little stopping you.
Full disclosure: this article is on a hosting provider’s blog. We’re CanSpace, a Canadian-incorporated company with every server on Canadian soil, Canadian-staffed support, and all plans billed in Canadian dollars. Migration is included with any hosting plan: we move your site, databases, and email for you.
If you’re ready to check us out, our hosting plans and domain transfer pages cover pricing, our why-Canadian explainer goes deeper on the jurisdiction question, or ask us anything directly.
