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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, and as someone who has never used website analytics: why do we need a third party for this? Couldn't a bit of client side code + server side code do all the work these days?

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You can self-host Fathom, I do.

It's very basic compared to Piwik, but it runs on PostgreSQL, my DB of choice, and it's written in Go, not PHP, which means it has higher performance and is more secure.

Go is not inherently more secure than PHP.

There's nothing stopping you deliberately writing unsecure Go code but it's harder to make errors that open up security holes in Go. For example, Go's shell exec is better than PHPs equivalent by default. https://golang.org/pkg/os/exec/

I'd actually have to do some searching to find out how to write unsecure Go code.

Hey, good to see you already running Fathom!

Just wanted to add that you can also use Fathom with MySQL or SQLite if that's more your cup of tea. It supports those 3 database engines right now.

Does it work with CockroachDB? It aims for compatibility with Postgres but there are some differences so some projects aren't compatible.

To save time, like most other SaaS.

You don't need it. Most SaaS applications are like 90% of the B2C market: It's for convenience.

Please check out https://matomo.org (former name Piwik) for open-source self-hosted website analytics (with server logs support)

Do you want a customer or a slave?

If you sell software, you have a customer that can do whatever they like.

If you provide SAAS you can tie in the user more and more.

that depends on if you offer data extraction to your users. If you intentionally make it impossible to users to take away their data when they leave, that's a shady move.

To save time. Same reason you use Sendgrid or any other SaaS

Not all websites are served from the same places.

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