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A hosting company set up shop on Sealand, a self-declared principality on an old fort off the coast of England...
A hosting company once tried to put its servers beyond the reach of governments by moving them onto a sea fort. Wikipedia says HavenCo was founded in 2000 to operate from Sealand, an unrecognised self-declared principality that occupies HM Fort Roughs off the coast of England.
The pitch was simple.
Wikipedia's Sealand article says Roughs Tower was constructed by the United Kingdom as one of the Maunsell Forts. Grimmelmann's verdict on how the venture ended is that HavenCo failed not from too much law but from too little.
The business had its own problems. The Volokh Conspiracy calls it a classic early-2000s dot-com flameout, overhyped and underused, and says there had also been a deep rift between HavenCo and its hosts.
Wikipedia says Ryan Lackey left HavenCo under acrimonious circumstances in 2002, citing disagreements with the Bates family over management of the company. The Volokh Conspiracy reports that he said HavenCo had been effectively nationalized, and that by 2008 even its website had fallen over.
If your plan depends on a legal loophole, ask who enforces it and what happens when someone ignores it. If you host anything sensitive, pick a provider whose rules you can read and a court you can reach.
Customers pay for a service that works. Build that first, then go looking for a clever address.
The Volokh Conspiracy describes HavenCo as offering an offshore hosting site for data of any kind, safe from governmental snoops, censors, and prudes. Grimmelmann writes that HavenCo built out Sealand as a data center, moving in computer servers and connecting them to the Internet, and that the idea was a data haven that would store content illegal in other countries.
The country was a fort.