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Field notes

Every number Statable shows you comes out of ClickHouse

Statable is privacy-first web analytics, hosted in the EU. No cookies, no sampling, and no throwing away raw rows once a chart has been drawn. Every pageview, every session, every goal completion is kept as data you can still query later.

That last part is the whole reason this post exists. Keeping everything is an easy promise to make and an expensive one to keep, and the thing that makes it affordable for us is the database underneath.

ClickHouse is the primary database behind Statable. Not a cache in front of something else, not a reporting sidecar. Every chart in the product is a query against it.

What happens when your server inherits a pirate site's IP address

One morning a customer opened their dashboard and looked at the Hosts report, which had shown the same single row since the day they installed us. There were two rows now. The first was their domain. The second was a name they had never seen in their life.

They did what anyone would do and opened it.

It was their site. Not similar to their site. Theirs. Same layout, same copy, same photographs, same links, down to the wording of the footer. A different domain name at the top of the browser and nothing else different at all.

They came to us to work out what they were looking at.