Where is my event and customer data stored? Do you have access to it?

When you sell tickets through Tickera, every event you create, every order that comes in, every attendee that registers, and every check-in scan lives in your own WordPress database — not on Tickera’s servers. We never see your sales data, and your customers never have an account with us. That’s the whole point of a self-hosted ticketing plugin.

Where exactly is the data stored?

Tickera stores everything in your WordPress database — the same MySQL or MariaDB database that already holds your site’s posts, pages and users. Event records, ticket types, orders, attendee details, custom form responses and check-in history all live there, alongside wp_posts and wp_users, on the hosting environment you’ve chosen for your site.

That means the data is governed by:

• Your hosting provider’s terms — wherever your WordPress site is hosted (SiteGround, Kinsta, your own VPS, anywhere) is wherever your ticket data physically lives.
• Your backup setup — if you back up your WordPress database, you back up your ticket data. There’s no separate Tickera export to worry about.
• Your site’s access controls — whoever has admin access to your WordPress dashboard can see attendees and orders. Tickera respects WordPress user roles.

What does “no access” actually mean?

We don’t have a database of your customers. We don’t run a payment processor that sees your orders. We don’t have a SaaS dashboard showing your sales. Tickera is a plugin you install on your site — once activated, it operates entirely within your hosting environment.

The only outbound communication Tickera makes is for plugin updates and license validation — the same kind of update check every legitimate WordPress plugin performs. No customer data, attendee names, ticket numbers or order amounts ever leave your site.

How this compares to hosted ticketing platforms

Most ticketing services — Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Universe, RegFox — are centralized platforms. When you sell a ticket there, the buyer’s account, payment record and contact details live in the platform’s database. The platform owns the customer relationship. You get a CSV export if you ask nicely.

Tickera flips that:

• The buyer pays you (through your own Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net or other gateway account)
• The buyer’s record is created in your WordPress site as a regular WP user (or guest order, if you allow checkout without an account)
• The attendee list is a database table you can query, export, integrate with your CRM, sync to Mailchimp, hand to your team — without asking a third party for permission

For organizers selling under their own brand, this matters: post-event marketing, repeat-attendee discounts, sponsorship reporting, refund policies — all of it is easier when you own the data.

GDPR, CCPA and data residency

Because Tickera doesn’t process or store data outside your site, GDPR and CCPA compliance is largely a question of how your WordPress site handles data — privacy policy, cookie consent, processor agreements with your hosting provider, etc. We’re not a data processor in the GDPR sense because we never receive the data. If you’re hosting in the EU, your ticket data stays in the EU. If you’re hosting in the US, it stays in the US. The choice is yours.

For the specifics of how attendee personal data flows during checkout (name, email, custom form fields), see our docs on how Tickera handles orders and attendees and the optional Custom Forms add-on.

What about payments?

Payment data — credit card numbers, bank details — is handled entirely by your payment gateway (Stripe, PayPal, Square, etc.). Tickera doesn’t store card numbers; it just records the order metadata (gateway used, transaction ID, amount, status) so you have a complete audit trail in WordPress. See the full list of supported gateways for which processors are available.

Related questions

• I want to know how Tickera works
• Does Tickera require WooCommerce?
• Does Tickera work only with WordPress?