Dynamics CRM Online is hosted at various locations in the world. Preview organizations can be created in all available locations, but features are sometimes rolled out on a schedule, in some locations faster than others.

The format of the Dynamics CRM Online Organization URL describes the data center location. As such, the standard format is as follows:

https://OrganizationName.crm[x].dynamics.com

The OrganizationName is the name you have selected for your online organization. This is customizable and is validated for uniqueness within the respective data center.

[x] represents a number. As of this writing, this number can be anywhere between 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, or no number at all. This describes the global data center used to host your organization. The following table maps the data center to the URL format:

Out of these global locations, usually the following get a preview and the new features first:

New data centers are being added on a regular basis. At the time of writing, new data centers are being added in Europe and Canada, with others to follow as needed.

Some of the drivers behind adding these new data centers revolve around not only performance improvements, as a data center located closer to a customer will provide theoretically better performance, but also a need for privacy and localization of data. Strict legislation around data residency has a great impact on the selection of the deployment model by customers who are bound to store all data local to the country of operation.

In total, by the end of 2016, the plan is to have Dynamics CRM Online available in 105 markets. These markets (countries) will be served by data centers spread across five generic global regions.

These data centers share services between Dynamics CRM Online and other services such as Azure and Office 365.