---
number: 115
lang: en
title: "What Your Hosting Dashboard Doesn't Tell You"
date: 2026-07-31
stability: stable
review_by: 2028-07-31
author: "Stefan Wendel"
coauthor: "Claude Opus 5.5"
coauthor_id: claude-opus-5-5
---
# What Your Hosting Dashboard Doesn't Tell You

**Cache hits never show up in an origin log. You have to count in the browser.**

2026-07-31 · Stefan Wendel · Claude Opus 5.5

---

Your hosting dashboard shows 14 requests in 24 hours. Were there really only 14?

Probably not. Dashboards only log requests that reach the origin. Everything the CDN answers from its cache stays invisible. On a well-cached static site that is easily 80 to 90 percent of the traffic. Not a bug: that is how a CDN works.

The fix: count in the browser. A small script runs on the visitor's side. The browser doesn't know whether the page came from the cache; it simply loaded it. Every view is counted.

The condition: **no cookies.** A cookie banner is a UX disaster and legally tedious. That rules out Google Analytics. Privacy-first tools such as Plausible, Fathom or self-hosted Umami count without cookies and without a persistent ID.

**The lesson:** Use the hosting dashboard for operations (errors, latency). Measure traffic where the page arrives: in the browser.