Transmit
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Draft: this text is waiting for a final check before it is relied on.
How Transmit is hosted
Chat lives in one place. Voice and video run on servers close to the people using them.
[[TO CONFIRM: every location on this page is a placeholder until the real servers are arranged.]]
The short version
- Chat, accounts and files are kept together in one region, so everything stays consistent and your data has one clear home.
- Voice and video go straight from your device to a media server, so we place those servers in several regions to keep the delay low.
- Cloudflare sits in front of the website, the app and live connections, to make them faster and to filter out attacks.
Where things run
app, chat and database media servers (voice and video) stored files
| Pin | What | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | App and chat servers | London, UK | Sign-in, messages, servers and channels, notifications |
| 1 | Database | London, UK | Accounts, messages and settings, backed up daily and kept for 8 days |
| 1 | Media server | London, UK | Voice and video for the UK and nearby |
| 2 | Stored files | Amsterdam, EU | Photos and files you send, private and served by short-lived links |
| 3 | Media server | Frankfurt, EU | Voice and video for central and eastern Europe |
| 4 | Media server | Virginia, US | Voice and video for the Americas |
Why voice and video run in more than one place
Voice and video are sensitive to distance. Every few thousand kilometres adds delay, which you hear as people talking over each other and see as stuttering streams. Text can wait a fraction of a second without anyone noticing. Voice cannot.
- Lower delay. You connect to the nearest media server, so conversation feels natural.
- Steadier quality. A shorter, less crowded path means fewer dropped packets and cleaner video.
- No extra stops. Voice and video go straight from your device to the media server. They do not pass through the chat servers or Cloudflare.
- Resilience. If one media server has a problem, calls can move to another.
A call lives on one media server, chosen by who is in it, so a call between people on different continents is closer to some of them than others. Calls with everyone in the same region get the best result.
Why chat stays in one region
Keeping the database and the chat servers together means every action is fast and consistent, and we can say plainly where your data is. Spreading chat across continents would make it slower and much harder to keep correct, with little gain for text. Cloudflare keeps the website, the app's files and live connections quick for people far away.
Who else is involved
The companies that help us run Transmit, and what each one does, are listed in the privacy policy.