Do you keep access logs with my visitors' IP addresses?
No. Our server logs record the page and the result, not your visitors' IP addresses or browsers. Cloudflare sees both and keeps them for 31 days.
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
No. The logs on our servers don't record your visitors' IP addresses or browser details. Since the address is never written down, there's nothing to anonymize or shorten later.
Cloudflare is the exception. It sits in front of your site, needs the IP address to do its job, and its dashboard keeps that data for 31 days.
A visit to your site passes through four places, and each one keeps something different. Below is what each one records, why, how long it stays, and when it gets looked at.
This covers sites on our regular plans. A custom plan runs on its own server with a different setup, so ask us about yours.
Cloudflare: IP address and browser, 31 days
Every request to your site reaches Cloudflare first. It's the content delivery network and firewall in front of your site, and it's on our list of sub-processors.
Cloudflare uses the IP address to block known attack patterns and to challenge traffic that looks automated. It also limits how often one address can ask for a sign-in link to your site, which stops someone flooding your members with emails.
The Cloudflare dashboard shows a sample of the requests to your site, including the ones it stopped. One blocked request looks roughly like this:
Date 9 Nov 2026, 14:02:17
IP address 203.0.113.7
Country Germany
Path /members/api/send-magic-link/
User agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) ...
Action Block
Service Rate limiting rules
The dashboard goes back 31 days. On a busy site it shows a sample rather than every request. What Cloudflare keeps on its own side falls under its privacy policy:
Our servers: no request log
Cloudflare hands the request to one of our servers, which passes it on to your site. That step writes no line per request, so no IP address is stored there either.
Your Ghost site: no IP address
Your Ghost site writes one line for every request it answers:
[2026-11-09 15:51:21] INFO "GET /welcome/" 200 12ms
That's the time, the address on your site, the status code and how long the answer took. There's no IP address, no browser and no referrer. When something fails, Ghost adds the error:
[2026-11-09 11:23:07] ERROR Post not found.
These lines stay with the container your site runs in, and each container keeps at most 30 MB of them. Once that's full, the oldest lines go first, so a busy site's log covers less time than a quiet one's. Every restart or update gives your site a new container. The four before the current one are kept, logs included, and older ones are deleted. None of this is ever part of your backups.
Ghost does see the IP address for a moment. It uses it to slow down repeated wrong passwords on your Ghost admin, and it stores a hash of the address for that, not the address itself.
These logs get read when your site shows an error or won't start, when a newsletter or an import fails, and whenever you ask us to look into something on your site.
Analytics: a daily visitor ID
Ghost's built-in analytics count your visitors without cookies. For every page view, the analytics service mixes the IP address and browser details with a random value that's new each day. The mix becomes a visitor ID that can't be reversed, and the IP address itself isn't stored.
A stored page view holds this:
Time 2026-11-09 15:51:21
Visitor ID 3f9a2c… (64 characters, changes every day)
Page /welcome/
Came from Google
Browser chrome, macos, desktop
Member the member's ID, if the reader is signed in
It also keeps the browser's full identification string, which is where the browser, system and device come from.
Each day's random value is deleted within a day after that day ends. From then on, nobody can work out which IP address a visitor ID came from, us included. The analytics service logs its own errors only, without visitor details.
Nobody on our side reads single page views. They're there for the analytics dashboard in your Ghost admin.
How we handle your members' data is set out in our data processing agreement:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
And this covers where your site and its data are stored:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
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