1. What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that websites place on your device when you visit. They're widely used to make websites work, remember your preferences, and provide a better experience. Similar technologies — including local storage, session storage, pixels, and SDKs — work similarly and are covered by this policy too.
2. How we use cookies
HostingDon uses cookies for two reasons:
- To make the website work — keeping you logged in, remembering your shopping cart, securing forms against CSRF attacks. These are strictly necessary.
- To remember small preferences — your selected currency, your theme, the EU region you've chosen for hosting. These are functional and you can turn them off.
We do not use cookies for cross-site advertising, retargeting, behavioral profiling, or selling data to third parties. We don't use Facebook Pixel, Google Ads, LinkedIn Insight Tag, or any other advertising tracker.
3. Types of cookies we use
3.1 Strictly necessary cookies
These cookies are essential for the website to function. They cannot be turned off because the site won't work without them. They don't store any personally identifiable information beyond what's needed (like a session ID).
Examples: keeping you logged in, securing your shopping cart against CSRF attacks, persisting an authentication state across pages.
3.2 Functional cookies
These cookies remember choices you make to give you a better experience — but the site works fine without them. You can opt out anytime.
Examples: remembering your preferred currency, language, theme, or EU data residency selection.
3.3 Analytics
We use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-friendly, open-source analytics tool. Plausible does not use cookies and does not collect personal data. It gives us aggregate numbers like "1,200 page views to /pricing yesterday" — nothing tied to a specific user.
Because Plausible doesn't use cookies, no consent banner is required for analytics under the ePrivacy Directive or GDPR.
3.4 Marketing / advertising cookies
We don't use these. Not on hostingdon.com, and not anywhere we have control. If you ever see one, please report it to privacy@hostingdon.com — it's a bug.
4. Cookies we set
The full list of cookies set by hostingdon.com:
| Cookie name | Type | Purpose | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
hd_session |
Strictly necessary | Authentication session ID after login | Session (until browser closes) or 30 days if "Remember me" |
hd_csrf |
Strictly necessary | CSRF token to protect forms from cross-site request forgery | Session |
hd_cart |
Strictly necessary | Stores plan selections in checkout flow | 7 days or until checkout completes |
hd_consent |
Strictly necessary | Records your cookie preferences (so we don't show the banner again) | 365 days |
hd_currency |
Functional | Your selected display currency (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.) | 365 days |
hd_locale |
Functional | Your preferred language (English, German, Spanish, Japanese) | 365 days |
hd_region |
Functional | Your selected hosting region for new orders | 365 days |
hd_theme |
Functional | Light/dark mode preference for the customer dashboard | 365 days |
All cookies are first-party (set by hostingdon.com) and use the SameSite=Lax attribute. Authentication cookies are also flagged HttpOnly and Secure.
5. Third-party cookies
We don't embed third-party advertising or tracking scripts on hostingdon.com. The only third-party services that load on our marketing pages are:
- Plausible Analytics — cookieless. Hosted in Estonia (EU). Privacy policy
- Stripe.js — loaded only on the checkout page, where you've explicitly chosen to enter payment details. Stripe may set its own cookies for payment fraud prevention. Privacy policy
- Cloudflare — our CDN. Cloudflare may set a
__cf_bmcookie for bot management. This cookie does not contain personal data and is not used for tracking. Privacy policy
The customer dashboard at my.hostingdon.com is authenticated and may load additional first-party tools (Sentry for error monitoring, our internal feature flag service). No advertising or analytics trackers are loaded in the dashboard.
6. Managing your cookie preferences
6.1 On hostingdon.com
You can update your cookie preferences anytime by clicking the "Cookie preferences" link in the footer of any page. From there you can disable functional cookies (you'll need to keep strictly necessary cookies for the site to work).
6.2 In your browser
All modern browsers let you control cookies — block them, delete them, or browse in private mode. Some helpful guides:
Note: If you block strictly necessary cookies, you won't be able to log in to your account or complete checkout.
7. Do Not Track
Some browsers send a "Do Not Track" (DNT) signal. Because there's no agreed-upon standard for how websites should respond, we treat DNT as informational. However, since we already don't use any tracking or advertising cookies, DNT users get the same minimal-cookie experience as everyone else by default.
For Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals, we honor them as opt-out signals where applicable under CCPA — though again, we don't sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising in any case.
8. Changes to this policy
We may update this Cookies Policy as we add or remove tools. If we add any cookies that require consent under EU law, we will update our cookie banner accordingly and ask you again. The "Last updated" date reflects the most recent revision.
9. Contact
Questions about this Cookies Policy?
- Email: privacy@hostingdon.com
- DPO (for EU/UK matters): dpo@hostingdon.com
- Or use the contact form.