You live in Manila; your customers' data lives in Frankfurt

You're a one-person company in Manila selling to German mid-market firms. The first procurement call asks where the data is hosted, and "on my cloud account" is not something they can write down.

You filter the marketplace to country=DE, rent the box, and deploy. Your customers' containers are on a physical machine in Frankfurt. You administer it from wherever you happen to be, through URLs, and administration is not residency: the disk doesn't move when you do.

The next call gets an answer with a city in it. Frankfurt. A datacenter name. Single tenant, no other customer's workload on the hardware, full-disk encryption with the key held off the machine. The kind of answer a company with a compliance team gives, from a company with one person in it.

Where the founder lives stopped mattering. Where the box lives is the answer.