How Risved works

Most platforms that promise "European cloud" still run your data through their central servers. The sovereignty is geographic, not architectural. If their database leaks, so does yours.

Risved works differently.

Your server. Your data. Your control.

When you use Risved, your projects run on a VPS that you own. Not a multi-tenant cluster we share between customers. Not a central database that holds everyone's data. A single-tenant server, in Europe, with your name on it.

Everything that matters — your code, your databases, your backups, your deployment history, your analytics — lives on that server. We don't have a copy. We couldn't hand one over if we tried.

Two halves of the product

Risved has two parts that work together:

The control plane — runs on your server

The control plane is the dashboard you log into to deploy projects, view logs, manage domains, and configure backups. It's a self-contained application that runs on your VPS alongside your projects.

This is also the open-source core of Risved, licensed under AGPL-3.0. The same software that powers Risved Cloud powers self-hosted Risved. There is no "enterprise version" with extra features held back. There is no telemetry pipeline shipping your project data to us. It's one codebase, auditable, on GitHub, running on your hardware.

Risved Cloud — runs on risved.com

If you don't want to manage a VPS yourself, Risved Cloud handles provisioning for you. You sign up at risved.com, pick a plan, and we spin up a Hetzner VPS in Europe with the control plane pre-installed. Billing, server lifecycle, and initial setup live on our side.

But once your server exists, everything that happens on it happens on your server. We don't proxy your traffic. We don't mirror your data. We don't read your logs. Risved Cloud is a provisioning and billing layer — nothing more.

What this means in practice

Your code never touches our servers. Deployments go from your Git provider directly to your VPS. We're not in the path.

Your data never touches our servers. Databases, uploaded files, user accounts — all on your VPS. Backups go from your VPS directly to your chosen offsite destination (Backblaze B2, Scaleway, Hetzner Storage Box, or your own).

Your backup encryption keys live on your server. Not ours. If Risved disappeared tomorrow, your backups would still be intact, still decryptable by you, still restorable with standard tools.

Your control plane is yours to keep. Cancel Risved Cloud and you can export your VPS image, move it to another provider, keep running the control plane forever. The software is AGPL-3.0 — nobody can take it away from you.

What we do know

We're honest about the minimum we do collect, because honesty is the point.

For every Risved instance (Cloud and self-hosted), we receive a daily ping containing:

A random install ID
The control plane version
The current time

Nothing else. Not your domain, not your IP, not your project count, not your data. This helps us know how many instances exist and whether old versions need security patches.

For Risved Cloud customers, we additionally know:

That the VPS we provisioned for you is running (via Hetzner's API, which we use to bill you correctly)
Operational metadata you opt into sharing — version, uptime, project count, aggregate usage — which powers the live dashboard at risved.com

You can turn the operational reporting off in your control plane settings. Your dashboard loses live stats; everything else keeps working.

The full list of what each signal contains, down to the JSON payload, is in our privacy documentation.

Why we built it this way

We think "European cloud" should mean something stronger than "our data center is in Frankfurt." It should mean that your data structurally cannot be centralised, handed over, or quietly repurposed — because it was never ours to begin with.

This architecture is harder to build than a traditional multi-tenant SaaS. It means we can't mine your data for product decisions, can't upsell based on your usage patterns, can't offer features that require a global view of all customer activity.

That's fine. We think it's the right way to build this kind of product — and we hope that resonates.