8 min read
Self-hosting vs SaaS for link data
An honest accounting of running your own redirect infrastructure: what it really costs, what it actually buys, and when the answer is obviously SaaS.
infrastructureprivacyoperations
Blog
Notes on links, clicks and the data behind them
Working notes from building gecis.in: how click analytics is actually collected, what the numbers can and cannot support, and the things we got wrong first.
5 articles
11 min read
What a click actually tells you
One HTTP redirect yields 28 stored fields. Four are facts, several are educated guesses, one is mostly wrong. A field-by-field audit of link analytics.
analyticsengineeringdata
11 min read
Why link shorteners get abused, and what a responsible one does about it
A shortener is an open redirect with a business model. Phishing, SSRF, SEO laundering: the real attacks, the defences that work, and their honest limits.
securityabuselinks
10 min read
UTM parameters, properly
The five parameters, the mistakes that break attribution, why a short link must forward UTMs rather than swallow them, and a taxonomy that survives a team.
marketinganalyticslinks
10 min read
Counting unique visitors without cookies
A daily-rotating salted hash gives you unique-visitor counts with no cookie and no consent banner. How we built it, and the four things it quietly gives up.
privacyanalyticsengineering