Self-hosted tracker vs SaaS — the uptime tradeoff nobody budgets for

Self-hosted tracker vs SaaS — the uptime tradeoff nobody budgets for

The real self-hosted vs SaaS decision isn't price. It's who owns uptime when a redirect goes down at 3am.

Choose SaaS (Voluum-style) when:
— You don't want to own server monitoring, scaling, and patching.
— Their redirect uptime SLA beats what you'd run solo.
— You'd rather pay per event than staff DevOps.

Choose self-hosted (Keitaro-style) when:
— You can run monitoring, failover, and a CDN in front of redirects.
— You need data ownership and per-click economics at scale.
— You accept that downtime is your problem.

Tradeoffs to log:
— SaaS down = you wait and lose traffic; self-hosted down = you fix it but you control the fix.
— Self-hosted needs: uptime monitor on the redirect domain, automated restart, and a warm standby.
— A dead redirect domain loses 100% of clicks silently — both models need external monitoring you own.

Rule: whichever you choose, run an independent uptime monitor hitting a live redirect every 60s. Never trust the platform to alert you about itself.

Save this SOP. Run this before every launch.