In February, my Google Cloud free credits will expire, so yesterday I decided to migrate many of my Politiwatch projects to Microsoft Azure (where I have recurring free credits). I thought this process would take days—but thanks to Kubernetes, it only took about 45 minutes.

When I built Shynet, my self-hosted analytics tool, one of my top priorities was making sure it didn’t require visitors to have JavaScript enabled. While Shynet will try to log visits using a JavaScript tracker, it will fall back to a 1x1 transparent tracking pixel if JavaScript isn’t enabled. Here is the Shynet tracking code for this site, for example:

Ever since I released Shynet, my open source web analytics tool, several people have asked me if I plan to offer some kind of managed version of the service (presumably as some kind of SaaS). While these requests are super exciting and I sympathize with them—not everyone wants to manage their own servers, after all!—it’s not something that I’m considering. Here’s why.