Independence & resilience
Who does your site depend on, and what happens if one of those dependencies becomes unavailable? We look at visible dependencies: hosting, DNS, CDN, third-party services, technical concentration, and public signs that can reveal dependencies that may complicate continuity or a move to another provider.
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One page. One pillar. A real report.
Enter your website and we’ll email you a report on Independence & resilience for your home page. Please allow at least 24 hours.
Our plans cover the 9 pillars across the pages of your whole site.
What we check
- The hosting country, and above all the supplier’s jurisdiction: servers located in Europe can still fall under extraterritorial orders if the operator answers to the law of another state.
- The share of your dependencies held by a single player, when one page calls on it alone for its audience measurement, its fonts, its bot protection and its maps.
- The layers crossed by all of your traffic (hosting, domain name, address resolution, content delivery, mail), and how many of them rest on the same supplier.
- The personal data that leaves the European Union during a plain visit, without anyone having asked for anything.
- What it would take to leave: a site set on a closed platform does not carry its content away the way a site built on open formats does.
What we find on the sites we audit
Across about 30 websites we audited between August 14, 2026 and September 24, 2026:
- 85% send personal data outside the European Union without safeguards
- 75% depend on one provider for several critical layers
Each percentage covers the sites where the point could be checked. Many were audited because a defect showed up quickly, so these figures describe our audits, not websites in general.
See also: Compliance & privacy, a real business website report.
What it changes for you
Your customers, and their lawyers, may ask these questions before signing. Public tenders, major clients and European partners sometimes ask them in writing.
Resilience is the other half of the subject, and it is not the same thing. A site hosted entirely at a non-European player but redundant is resilient without being independent; a site at a single European host is independent without being resilient. The report scores the two separately.
What this audit does not say
The examination covers what the visit reveals: the addresses that respond, the public registries, the third parties your pages call. Where a supplier is based, or the fact that a law like the CLOUD Act applies to it, is not enough to reach a legal conclusion: the report records the exposure without ruling on it.
Your hosting contracts, your backups and your service commitments are not readable there. A site can look concentrated on a single supplier and have a recovery plan that nothing, from outside, shows. The report establishes the concentration and asks the question, without answering it for you.
Every limit of the examination is stated in the methodology note of your report. A point that cannot be verified is never presented as compliant.
The weight of this pillar
An overall score has to weigh what matters for your business: the 9 pillars do not carry the same weight depending on what your site is for. Here is what “independence & resilience” represents in the overall score, under each weighting. The report always states which one produced your score.
| Type of site | Share of the overall score |
|---|---|
| Type not determined | 9% |
| Business / brochure site | 8% |
| E-commerce site | 8% |
| Application / customer portal | 8% |
| Blog / media site | 7% |
| Public-sector site | 13% |
This pillar is examined alongside the other eight in every plan, whatever the number of pages. See pricing →
Guides for this pillar
CLOUD Act: is your website exposed?
The CLOUD Act reaches data held by US providers, even on servers in Europe. Which layers of your website it covers, and what the audit looks at.
Read the guide →What your website sends outside the EU
A visit can send your visitor's IP address outside the EU (fonts, analytics, videos). Why it counts as a transfer, and what the audit records.
Read the guide →EU web hosting: more than server location
A server in the EU is not enough: your host's jurisdiction, DNS, CDN and email matter too. The questions to ask before you choose.
Read the guide →