Dear USA, my data has left your building

He could have been using Google Apps with a custom domain.

I've been using http://www.cheapvps.co.uk/ for bots and simple websites, and am pretty happy with it.

EDIT: as other people pointed out elsewhere, the UK may not be that much better (if at all better) than the US. The question is, though, where is safer?

It's the bottom line that's important. As long as the current surveillance regime is in place, there's nowhere you can be online that isn't watchable by them.

The NSA is the largest practitioner and consumer of surveillance among its allies and other targets, and likely drives and influences most surveillance activity among its allies and other targets. The NSA gets its funding from US tax collections, and those taxes are controlled by US politicians.

So at the least, non-US citizens and corporations should move their data and activity out of US-controlled or affiliated corporations. There is only one way that this surveillance can be changed at all, and that's by US corporations and their rich executives and shareholders feeling a rumbling in their bottom lines. This will rouse them to direct the recipients of their political and lobbying dollars to cut this shit out.

I'm sorry, but we citizens of the US have long lost control of our government. It's money.

Vote with your feet. Don't fund the US surveillance state.

Just as a thought exercise, this might not be a good trend for US businesses, but perverse reversion of this is that the less foreigners store their data at US companies, the less rational the NSA has to snoop there, meaning we may only have to worry about FBI, DEA, etc and they aren't as sophisticated as the NSA at this. I actually don't have a problem with any of these agencies personally, just a thought.

It' odd that perma-address providers like pobox.com aren't more popular.