Is there a data retention or disposal policy for hosted content

Using Netlify pro subscription to host docs for a software project. For audit purposes, we were asked about any data retention and/or disposal policies that are available or enforced.

tx

-cm

hi there, is this what you need?

Hi Perry, on the right track. The question I am getting is what happens to the actual content that is sourced on a github (we use Hugo), built and then deployed on the Netlify CDN. It is stored and reachable for how long if our account is active? If our account is inactive, then is it purged immediately?

tx

-chrismetz

great questions @chrisN9.

Let me answer it this way - sometimes folks assume that if they remove the content (or the repo that hosts the content), the content will also get deleted from our CDN nodes, and are confused when their sites stay reachable even after a deletion. But that doesn’t take into account that build process happens on our origin server, and we then push out the content to each CDN node globally. Those CDN nodes are all synced so that the same content is served from each one, regardless from where (on the globe) it is requested.

And here’s where we get to the answer. The way to delete content would be either, a.) to overwrite it with new content, making it inaccessible to the public or b.) deleting your netlify site. When that happens, content is deleted from both the origin and the CDN nodes. It does NOT get deleted from the repo it was cloned from (that would have to happen in a second step by someone who has the authority to edit or delete that repo.)

Does this answer your question? Happy to keep going into more detail if needed!

Perry, almost there, I think. Is it correct to say: the complete removal of static customer content from the netlify origin server and cdn will occur only upon cancellation of the netlify subscription. Otherwise it remains deployed/reachable. Is that correct?

tx again,

-chrisN9

i would rephrase as: "the complete removal of static customer content from the netlify origin server and cdn will occur in the following two scenarios:

  • deletion of the site from Netlify
  • cancellation of the Netlify account