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Privacy policy

Last updated August 21, 2026.

Anchor Hosting is a one-person WordPress hosting company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I’m Austin Ginder. This page is how I handle personal data.

It covers three different situations, because they are not the same thing.

  • This website (anchor.host). People who visit, fill in a form, subscribe, or pay an invoice.
  • The hosting service. Customers with an account: billing, email, the dashboard, backups.
  • Sites I host. Visitors to your WordPress site. That traffic is yours. The exception is privacy-friendly analytics I bundle into hosting, which I chose and which I run.

I don’t sell personal data. I don’t run ads. I don’t use Google Analytics.

This website

Analytics

I use Fathom Analytics to understand traffic on anchor.host. Fathom does not use cookies and does not build a profile of you. It briefly processes your IP address and browser type, then stores only anonymous totals: pages, referrers, device, country. I cannot tell who you are from that data.

You do not need a cookie banner for Fathom. If you want the details, Fathom publishes how they process data at usefathom.com/data.

Lawful basis under the GDPR: legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)), to improve this website.

Forms and email

The contact form asks for your name, email, how many sites you run, and whatever you want to tell me. The subscribe form asks for an email. Submissions stay in WordPress (Gravity Forms). I get a copy by email. Outbound email goes through Mailgun.

I use that to reply to you. That’s it.

Accounts and payments

If you become a customer I keep the obvious account details: name, email, company, the sites I host for you, invoices, and support history. Payments are processed by Stripe. I do not store full card numbers.

Cookies

The cookies on this site are the ones that make it work: logging into the dashboard, checkout, and (if you pick one) a light/dark theme stored in your browser. No advertising cookies. Fathom does not set a cookie.

The hosting service

To run hosting I store:

  • Account and billing information
  • The WordPress sites themselves (files and database), including nightly backups
  • Server access logs and error logs on the hosting infrastructure, with a long-term copy in Backblaze B2
  • Email I send you about your sites (updates, incidents, invoices)

Nightly backups are kept for the life of the account so I can restore a site after a compromise or a bad deploy. When the account closes, those long-term backups are purged. I keep a final snapshot for recovery. Access logs exist so I can debug outages and clean up malware. I also archive those long-term in Backblaze B2. I don’t read your mail, scrape your customer lists, or use anything in your database for marketing.

The servers live at Kinsta. Backup copies also go to Backblaze B2. I check each site’s public URL against Google’s Web Risk list so I get told if Google thinks the site is distributing malware. The rest of the monitoring is on the security page.

You are the controller of the content on your site, and of the personal data your own visitors give you (comments, orders, forms you add). I am a processor of that data: I store it because you asked me to host the site.

Analytics on sites I host

Hosting includes website analytics. I inject a small must-use plugin that loads a local JavaScript file on your site. Pageviews are processed by Fathom Analytics, under an account I own. Each site has its own Fathom site ID. You can see the numbers in the hosting dashboard.

Same rules as on this website: no cookies, no profiles, no sale of data. Fathom briefly processes IP address and browser type, then keeps only anonymous totals. The tracker is a first-party script on your domain. The count still goes to Fathom’s servers.

I bundled this so you have traffic stats without installing Google Analytics. I can turn it off on a site if you ask. Email austin@anchor.host.

If you have a privacy policy, mention Fathom. You do not need a cookie banner for it. Language you can paste:

We use Fathom Analytics, bundled by our host (Anchor Hosting), to understand traffic in a privacy-friendly way. It does not use cookies and complies with the GDPR, ePrivacy (including PECR), COPPA and CCPA. Your IP address is only briefly processed. We cannot identify you from this data. The lawful basis under the GDPR is legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)): improving the website. See usefathom.com.

Fathom’s own sample policy is the source of that wording.

Other companies that see data

I don’t pass personal data around for fun. These are the companies that process it so the service can run:

  • Kinsta. Servers for the WordPress sites I host.
  • Fathom Analytics (Conva Ventures Inc.). Website analytics on this site and on sites I host.
  • Stripe. Payments.
  • Mailgun. Transactional email.
  • Backblaze. Backup storage and long-term server log archives.
  • Xero. Invoicing and bookkeeping.

If you have visitors in the EU, Fathom processes those visits as my processor and offers a data processing agreement.

How long I keep it

  • Fathom. They do not keep personal data longer than 24 hours. The anonymous totals stay in the dashboard.
  • Account and billing. For the life of the account, then as long as tax and accounting rules require.
  • Backups. Nightly backups while the account is open. When the account closes, long-term backups are purged. I keep a final snapshot for recovery.
  • Contact form submissions. Until I no longer need them to help you.
  • Server logs. The hosting platform keeps access and error logs for a while. I also archive them long-term in Backblaze B2, for debugging and security.

Your rights

You can ask what I have, ask me to fix it, or ask me to delete it. Email austin@anchor.host.

If you are in the EU or UK you also have the usual GDPR rights: access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection, and portability, and the right to complain to a supervisory authority. I handle this as a small business. If you email me, I will do the thing. I’m not going to make you fill in a portal.

I do not sell personal information. If you are in California and you want that in writing: I do not sell or share personal information as those words are used in the CCPA/CPRA.

Changes

If this page changes, I’ll update the date at the top.

Contact

Austin Ginder
Anchor Hosting
342 N Queen St, Warehouse D
Lancaster, PA 17603
austin@anchor.host