US cloud or EU cloud — Hogsend Courses

PostHog Cloud runs in two independent regions, and you pick one at signup. Data does not move between them and you cannot merge across them — the one decision in this chapter that's hard to undo.

PostHog Cloud runs in two independent regions:

US Cloud — data hosted in the US (AWS, Virginia).
EU Cloud — data hosted in the EU (AWS, Frankfurt). New EU projects disable IP capture by default for a stronger privacy posture (the EU cloud announcement has the background).

You pick one at signup. This matters because data does not move between regions and you cannot merge across them. If most of your users (or your compliance obligations) are in Europe, start on EU Cloud. If you guess wrong, fixing it later means a migration, not a setting.

There's also a self-hosted open-source version. It's a real infrastructure commitment (it runs on ClickHouse) and PostHog actively steers small teams toward Cloud unless data-residency rules force self-hosting. For this course, Cloud is the sensible choice — the free tier (next piece) means there's no cost argument for self-hosting at your stage, and the operational cost of running ClickHouse yourself is real.

Hogsend, by contrast, is built to be self-hosted — your database, your email provider, your deploy. So a common setup is PostHog Cloud for analytics + self-hosted Hogsend for messaging, which keeps the customer data and the sending on your own infrastructure. The asymmetry is deliberate: analytics is read-heavy and fine to delegate; the messaging spine and the identity graph (the profile that ties one person's many identifiers — email, device, Discord — into a single record) are assets you want to own.