Non-EU vendorCDN, DNS & DomainsHeadquarters: US

Hurricane Electric Free DNS: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Hurricane Electric Free DNS is a hosted portal for managing DNS zones. It supports record types including A, AAAA, ALIAS, CNAME, CAA, MX, TXT and SRV, forward and reverse zones, secondary (slave) zones and dynamic DNS through HTTP updates or ddclient-compatible clients. According to the provider, the service runs on geographically diverse servers with IPv4 and IPv6 support. It is delivered as a web portal with nothing to install, and the site labels it as an open beta.

Hurricane Electric is a privately held company headquartered in Fremont, California, and operates its own global IP network and its own data centers in Fremont. The service therefore falls under US jurisdiction, and the DNS data for your domains is managed by a US provider. The service page names no privacy policy, no GDPR statement and no data storage location. European organisations that prefer not to rely on a US provider for DNS can combine the secondary-zone feature with a European primary or secondary nameserver.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Hurricane Electric Free DNS pre-selected

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Sovereignty score

17 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-30
No hosting in Europe (US)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
Key management with a non-European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 11, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	USVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	NoVendor-stated
Category	CDN, DNS & Domains
Type	Product
Website	dns.he.net ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Hurricane Electric Free DNS

The European alternatives to Hurricane Electric Free DNS come from our knowledge base of over 8,000 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

19 European CDN, DNS & Domains vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Hurricane Electric Free DNS

Hurricane Electric Free DNS is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Hurricane Electric Free DNS hosts data outside the EU (US). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Hurricane Electric Free DNS is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Hurricane Electric Free DNS together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Hurricane Electric Free DNS?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Hurricane Electric Free DNS include Bunny.net, CDNsun and ClouDNS. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Hurricane Electric Free DNS?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Hurricane Electric Free DNS include deSEC and dnsdist. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Hurricane Electric Free DNS GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Hurricane Electric Free DNS is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 11, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in CDN, DNS & Domains

CDN, DNS & Domains: Content delivery networks, DNS services and domain registration. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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