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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

I'm still trying to find an affordable, reliable, privacy-conscious analytics tool for a blog.

I don't want to run my own server. I'm willing to spend money. I'd like to spend ~$5/mo. I write less than 6 posts per year. A good post gets tens of thousands of lifetime views. A mediocre post gets five to ten thousand. My server burden is pretty bare bones.

All I really want to know are page views and referrers. My next experiment is to use a custom "tracking pixel" served from S3 and use log tools. But I have no idea if webcrawlers will distort my data or not. This would at least allow me to reliably count page views even for people who use ad-blockers.

Edit: Blog is static design, hosted on Netlify free tier. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/

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I’m really curious about this too, as I have very similar requirements, and also host on Netlify (where ‘server logs’ don’t exist). The possibilities I’ve come up with so far are:

- Hosting Fathom using Docker someplace affordably. I’ve tried this with Joyent, where I’ve been running a custom Docker container for ~1.5 months with no problems. It should be about $2.50/month, but they offered $250 in free credits for signing up (not sure if this expires at some point), so it hasn’t cost me anything yet.

- Using a very limited custom script with Keen.io to log only the timestamp, site visited, and referrer. It seems that Keen.io has a pretty good privacy policy, and my site’s traffic and my views of my dashboard seem to only cost about $0.01 to $0.02 per month so far, and I haven’t actually been charged that.

Happy to share more detail on the above, and curious to hear if anyone has other ideas.

I have pretty much the same requirements as you - ~5$/mo is the amount I'd be willing to spend for a personal blog.

Another alternative I discovered recently is https://simpleanalytics.io/ . At $9/mo it's still above my threshold, but it's a little bit cheaper than fathom. I guess I'll have to keep looking for an alternative.

Well, maybe that's just the price we have to pay for the privacy, aka not being a product ourselves ;)

How are you hosting your blog? If you're already self-hosting that, please know that you can easily host a Fathom instance using SQLite (because easy) on that same server without having to worry of it eating up your system resources.

From experience, a Fathom instance on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet can easily handle millions of pageviews a month. It's really quite efficient.

Static blog hosted for free on Netlify.

Does the Fathom script get picked up by ad-blockers? That's one of my concern with any off-the-shelf solution. They all involve a one-line javascript injection which is trivial to block.

if your blog was wordpress powered I would suggest this "wp statistics" plugin - one I finally found that stays self hosted not third party.

but I look at your .xyz and the source looks like it's something much leaner powering your blog there, so I don't think this one will work with that system.

I use awstats on some non-wp sites and it works server side / backend, giving plenty of details included most visited pages and referrers. It also sorts many of the bots into different tables and such. I think it's free / gnu. ( https://awstats.sourceforge.io/ )

Do you have access logs? Just parse those. You probably already have the analytics.

I’m pretty sure you can setup access logs for static sites on S3

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