Privacy

The short version

We measure how people find and read this site, using software we run ourselves on our own servers. We do not use Google Analytics, and nothing here is sold to or shared with an advertising network. Cloudflare, who host the site, also count visits with their own cookieless tool. Neither system stores anything on your device — no cookie, no local storage — which is why there is no consent banner to click through, and neither keeps a record of your IP address.

If you write to us or join the Pro waiting list, we keep what you typed so we can reply. That is the only place we hold anything that identifies you.

Measuring traffic

Every page on virtainer.io and docs.virtainer.io reports a page view to a server we operate, reached through virtainer.io itself. For each view we store:

• the page path, with any query string removed before it is written down;
• which of the two sites it was;
• the hostname you arrived from, if you followed a link (our own hostnames are not recorded);
• the campaign tags in the link you followed, if it had any (utm_source and friends);
• your country, as Cloudflare's network reports it — a country, not a location;
• a coarse reading of your browser and device: “Firefox on Linux, desktop”, with no version numbers;
• the time;
• and a visitor identifier, described below.

The visitor identifier

To tell one person reading five pages from five people reading one, each view carries a short identifier. It is a one-way hash of a random value that changes every day, combined with the site, your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, and your language setting.

The random value is thrown away after two days. Once it is gone, that day's identifiers cannot be recomputed or linked to anything — including to the next day's. So the identifier can count you within a day and cannot follow you beyond one, by us or by anyone who obtained our keys. It is also salted per site, so the same person visiting virtainer.io and the documentation appears as two unrelated identifiers.

Your IP address is used only inside that hash. It is never written to the database and never logged by us.

Actions

Alongside page views we record a few deliberate actions — clicking a download link, following a link off-site, submitting the waiting-list form — so we can tell which parts of the site are useful. These carry the same fields as a page view and nothing more.

Why there is no cookie banner

The rule that produces cookie banners — Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive — is about storing information on your device or reading what is already there. Our measurement does neither. There is no cookie, no local storage, no session storage, and no fingerprinting. There is nothing to ask you to agree to, so we do not interrupt you to ask.

Two things do touch your device, and both are exempt because you asked for them:

• Your theme choice. If you switch the site between light and dark, we save that preference in your browser under virtainer:theme. It never leaves your browser.
• The anti-spam check. The contact and waiting-list forms use Cloudflare Turnstile, which may set a short-lived token while it verifies you are not a bot. It is classified as strictly necessary and is not used to track you.

We do not consult the “Do Not Track” header. That signal asks not to be followed across sites — which is something this system cannot do, since the identifier is salted per site and rotates daily. There is no cross-site profile of you to opt out of.

When you write to us

The contact form and the Pro waiting list send what you type to the same server. We keep it so a person can reply to you.

• Contact: your name, email address, country, and message. If you attach a diagnostic report from a Virtainer host, we store that file too. A report is built to strip known secrets, but it can still contain hostnames, IP addresses, VM names and log output — look at it before you send it.
• Pro waiting list: your email address, and — only if you chose to answer — how many hosts you run and what you would use Pro for. We also record which link brought you to the page, so we know which of our posts were worth writing.

Attached diagnostic reports are kept in storage that only authenticated staff can reach.

We use waiting-list addresses to write to you about Virtainer Pro and for nothing else. We do not sell them, rent them, or pass them to anyone, and every message we send about Pro will carry a link to come off the list.

Other companies involved

• Cloudflare hosts both sites and the server that receives the above. Your requests pass through their network, and they process your IP address to route and protect them. It is the only company involved in simply reading the site. Three of their features run in your browser: the anti-spam check on our forms, their own cookieless measurement of traffic and page speed, and the network's own protection. None of them sets a tracking cookie, and none of them follows you to another site.

That is the whole list, and it is one company. The typefaces used to be requested from Google Fonts, which meant every visitor's browser disclosed its IP address to Google as a side effect of asking for them; they are now served from our own domain. Loading a page on either site reaches our servers and Cloudflare's, and nobody else's.

Search on the documentation site runs entirely in your browser against a pre-built index. What you search for is not sent anywhere.

How long we keep things

Traffic records are kept while they are useful for understanding how the site is doing, and are not linkable to you after a day regardless. Messages and waiting-list entries are kept while the conversation they belong to is still live, and are removed when it is not.

Asking us to remove your data

Write to us through the contact form and say what you would like removed. We will delete your waiting-list entry or your messages and confirm that we have. You do not need to give a reason.

For traffic records there is nothing to remove — by the time you could ask, the value that would identify which rows were yours no longer exists. That is deliberate.

Changes

If we start collecting something new, this page changes first and the date at the top changes with it.