Hosting: TAGGRS, alternatives and costs

What matters in hosting?

• Location: Servers in the EU simplify the data protection assessment and shorten response times for European visitors.

• Availability: At least 99.9 percent. Every hour of downtime is an hour without conversions.

• Scaling: Black Week, newsletter sends or a TV campaign create load peaks. The server has to scale with them without losing events.

• Your own subdomain: The server must be reachable under your domain, for example data.yourstore.com.

• Monitoring: A dashboard that shows how many requests arrive and whether errors occur.

• Predictable costs: Fixed plans rather than usage-based billing that surprises you at peak times.

Why do we recommend TAGGRS?

arboro is a TAGGRS partner and uses the service for client projects and for its own tracking on all arboro websites. The reasons are practical:

• EU hosting on its own infrastructure, not on Google Cloud.

• Fixed plans based on requests per month. According to the TAGGRS terms, up to 10,000 requests are free, up to 750,000 requests cost €25 per month, up to 3 million €65, up to 10 million €145, each plus VAT. Annual billing is cheaper.

• Features you would otherwise have to build yourself: your own subdomain, cookie recovery for longer lifetimes, anonymization of personal data, a gateway for the Meta Conversions API and templates for the common platforms.

• An analytics dashboard that shows how many requests are affected by tracking prevention and how much more is measured as a result. For many store owners, this is the first moment the data gap becomes visible.

• Store extensions for Shopware and Shopify that deliver the data layer.

What does the Google Cloud alternative cost?

Google itself offers hosting via Google Cloud. For production use, Google recommends at least three server instances for redundancy and estimates roughly 30 to 50 US dollars per instance per month. That puts the minimum at around 120 to 150 US dollars per month, more with high data volumes. For small and mid-sized stores, that is several times the price of a TAGGRS plan.

Google Cloud is mainly worthwhile for companies with their own IT department, very high data volumes and plans to analyze the data in BigQuery as well. Setup and maintenance are technically more demanding, and there is no dashboard for tracking losses.

Which other providers are there?

Besides TAGGRS, Stape, Addingwell, Tracklution and owntag have established themselves as hosting providers, some with EU servers, some on Google Cloud infrastructure. The differences lie in the details: server location, billing model, additional features and support. What matters most is not the provider but the quality of the setup.

Is your own server worth it?

In theory, a server container can run on your own hardware or a rented server. In practice, the store owner is then responsible for security updates, scaling, monitoring and redundancy. Misconfigured firewalls, open ports and missing updates make the tracking server an attack target. For online stores, a specialized provider is almost always the cheaper and safer choice.