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For a guest book, you don't need anything like that. A simple solution could be to create a file for each entry. It's append-only anyway.

For a view counter - yes, you can use a full blown database to concurrently increment a simple integer value; or, you could do it in a few lines of code by yourself too.

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$ apt install redis-server

$ redis-cli INCR hit-count

Still a huge overkill, and you need to properly set up persistence if you use it this way.

If you know that you'll need a cannon anyway, then sure, go for it, but when all we deal with are flies there's no reason to go that far. You could easily set up this kind of website on servers so simple that getting redis running on them would inflate their complexity quite considerably.

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