Quite a lot has happened over the past few weeks. Some of you may have noticed occasional short outages of the site.

TL;DR

In short, nothing particularly exciting has happened for you as users. For me, the most important point was finally moving the server architecture toward the cloud. The main reason for this is that I want to reduce ongoing costs. I’m continuing to rely on the services of [Hetzner](https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud/), as I’ve been a happy customer there for nearly two decades and their cloud pricing is simply unbeatable.

Other than that, as you’ve probably already noticed, the website has received a complete redesign! Overall, I’m quite happy with it, although there are still a few things I need to polish before it’s fully finished.

Along with the redesign, I also allowed myself to integrate an analytics tool. Up front: if the “Do Not Track” option is enabled in your browser, no data will be sent to my system. And if data does come through, the analytics tool is self-hosted by me on servers in Nuremberg, fully GDPR-compliant. This can, for example, still happen through OBS. However, you can simply append `&dnt` to the URL of the randomizer and you should then be excluded from tracking as well.

Server Architecture and Stability

As mentioned briefly in the TL;DR, I’ve spent a lot of time recently completely restructuring the server architecture. Unfortunately, since this involved a bit of “open-heart surgery,” there were moments when the servers were not reachable. The entire system is now officially running in the cloud, and if necessary in the future, I can scale much more easily should the servers reach their limits.

As a side note, this also allowed me to switch to much cheaper servers and reduce my ongoing costs from around €70 down to potentially ~€30. Alongside the architectural changes, I of course kept an eye on overall stability. There were a few hiccups during the migration, but by now everything should be running fairly smoothly. If you still notice any issues, you can of course continue to contact me at info@simply-stream.com.

My email client is always open and, alongside Discord, is the fastest way to reach me 😄

Analytics

Let’s move on to the “most critical” topic - at least for some of you. I decided to use a tool that allows me to analyze the general usage of the website a bit. For this purpose, I set up [Umami](https://umami.is/) on one of my cloud servers. So the question is: why do I even need this? The answer is actually quite simple.

Around 2022, I started building a small clip randomizer script for a streamer friend. Since then, a lot has happened, and alongside the code, the number of users has grown as well. The tool was shared within our small german speaking Twitch bubble through word of mouth (which was and still is very welcome!), but at some point I lost track of who was using the tool and how. And that’s exactly what this tool is for. I want to move away from the “I build whatever comes to mind” mode toward the “What do my users actually want, and how do they use it?” mode. And I’ve already gained some important insights from this!

For example, the system has become more international than I expected. Until recently, I assumed it was used mostly by my familiar german speaking Twitch bubble. I was very surprised to discover that users from the USA to Sweden are involved! So first of all, a small apology to my international visitors if you still find the occasional German word here and there 😅 I did try to translate everything into English at least, but sometimes laziness won out. Additionally, I’d like to have the option to share “campaign” links in the future, so I can see which measures have how much impact.

For example, I’m planning to produce 30-second Shorts/TikTok tutorials for the site next year. It would be really interesting to see whether people are finding their way to the site from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or even Bluesky. But now perhaps the most important question: what is actually being tracked? For that, I can directly refer you to the manufacturer’s documentation: https://docs.umami.is/docs/metric-definitions. Funny enough: the only thing that is *not* tracked is German locations.

Redesign

There isn’t much to say here, except that I hope you like the new design 😄 Since I’ve noticed that people occasionally stumble across my site via Google, I wanted to spruce it up a bit and make it look more professional, so it doesn’t feel like something sketchy or scammy is going on here!

I’ve also taken the liberty of adding my domain to the randomizer view. Once the redesign is fully finished, I’ll start working on giving you more customization options for the randomizer as well. Of course, you should be able to adapt it to your stream overlay!