Who we are
SmartXplans (smartxplans.com) is a technical blog covering self-hosted infrastructure, developer tools, and AI tools for indie developers. This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect and how it’s used.
Affiliate Disclosure
Some links on this site — particularly in reviews and comparisons (e.g. VPS hosting providers) — are affiliate links. If you click one and sign up for a paid service, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only link to products and services we’ve genuinely evaluated, and our opinions are our own.
Advertising and Cookies
This site may display advertisements served by third-party ad networks, including Google AdSense. These networks may use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this or other websites. You can learn more about how Google uses data at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and opt out of personalized advertising through Google Ads Settings.
We may also use analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) to understand how visitors use the site. These tools use cookies to collect anonymized usage data.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, plus the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string, to help with spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to check whether you use it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available at automattic.com/privacy. After your comment is approved, your profile picture is visible publicly alongside your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the site, avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included — visitors can download and extract location data from images.
Cookies
If you leave a comment, you may opt in to saving your name, email, and website in cookies for your convenience on future comments. These last one year.
If you visit our login page, a temporary cookie is set to determine if your browser accepts cookies — it contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
Advertising and analytics cookies (see “Advertising and Cookies” above) may also be set, depending on your consent choice where required by law.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, code snippets, images). Embedded content from other websites behaves exactly as if you visited that other website directly, and that website may collect data about you, use cookies, and monitor your interaction with the embedded content.
Who we share your data with
If you request a password reset, your IP address is included in the reset email. We do not sell your personal data to third parties.
How long we retain your data
Comments and their metadata are retained indefinitely, so we can recognize and approve follow-up comments automatically rather than holding every comment for manual moderation.
What rights you have over your data
If you’ve left a comment on this site, you can request an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, or request that we erase it — except where we’re required to retain it for legal or security reasons.
Contact
Questions about this policy can be sent to the contact address listed on our About page.