Practical guide · Hosting and Law 25
Odoo hosting in Quebec and Law 25
A management system holds your customers’ contact details, your employees’ records and your financial data. Knowing where all of it resides isn’t a technical detail: since Law 25, it’s a question a Quebec SMB must be able to answer.
Where is your data when you use Odoo?
It depends entirely on the option you choose, and it’s rarely explained when you sign up:
- Odoo Online — on Odoo’s servers, whose geographic distribution is out of your hands.
- Odoo.sh — on a cloud infrastructure where you choose the region, with a layer of intermediaries.
- Managed server — on an identified machine, in a data centre you can name.
In the first two cases, the answer to “where is my data?” goes through a foreign provider. In the third, it fits in one sentence.
What Law 25 really requires of SMBs
Law 25 modernizes the protection of personal information in Quebec. It applies to every private business, whatever its size — there is no threshold that would exempt an SMB.
The obligations that most affect a business like our clients:
- designate a person in charge of the protection of personal information;
- keep a register of confidentiality incidents and report those that present a serious risk;
- publish a clear privacy policy;
- obtain valid consent for collection and use;
- carry out a privacy impact assessment before communicating personal information outside Quebec.
This last point is the one most often misunderstood. The law does not prohibit hosting your data outside Quebec. It requires that you have done the assessment and can justify it. Hosting here doesn’t exempt you from the other obligations; it simply removes one step, and one question to answer.
If your website isn’t up to standard yet, we take care of the technical side: see what Law 25 requires of a website and our compliance packages range from $80 for an audit to $600 for the complete package.
We are not lawyers. For a reading of your particular situation, consult a legal advisor — we take care of the technical side.
Hosting in Canada: what it changes in practice
Beyond the regulatory side, a few practical effects:
- 🔹 Lower latency — the system responds faster from Quebec
- 🔹 A contact in your time zone, who answers in French or English
- 🔹 A simple, verifiable answer to give a customer who asks you
- 🔹 No dependency on a foreign provider’s pricing policy
Our servers are at OVH, in Canada, and monitored daily.
The three options compared
Odoo Online — the easiest to get started. Little room to customize, no server access, and a bill that follows the number of users. Suits anyone who wants a standard Odoo without asking questions.
Odoo.sh — designed for custom projects, with test environments and continuous deployment. Powerful, billed by resource, and you need to know how to use it. It’s a developer tool.
Managed server — a dedicated VPS that we take care of: installation, updates, backups, monitoring. A fixed monthly cost, from $20, regardless of the number of users. You remain the owner of your database and can leave with it.
Backups: the question people forget to ask
“Is it backed up?” almost always gets a yes. The right questions come after:
- How often, and how many versions are kept?
- Are the copies somewhere other than the main machine?
- Has anyone ever tested a restore?
- How long would it take to get back up and running?
The third is the only one that really matters. A backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis, not a guarantee.
For our clients: daily local and off-site backup, twelve months of retention on a progressive cycle, and tested restores.
Changing hosts later — is it possible?
Yes, and it’s something to check before committing anywhere. An Odoo database is portable: it is backed up on one side and restored on the other, with its documents.
What complicates a migration isn’t the technology: it’s not having access to your own backups. Ask the question before you sign, not on the day you want to leave.
On our side, migrating to a more powerful server is a routine service, planned with no service interruption.
Where is your data today?
If you can’t answer, that’s already an answer. Write to us: we’ll look at your current situation and what it would take to clarify it.