Ask HN: Looking for a simple and free website analytics solution

13 points·wheresvic4··8 comments

Hi!

I have a low traffic blog and would like to get a bit of insight on where it is coming from. I know there are quite a few solutions out there but I don't want to use Google.

I'm looking for something simple, straightforward, maybe self-hosted but if not, with a generous free plan :)

What does the HN community recommend?

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GoatCounter is a pretty straightforward option.

https://www.goatcounter.com/

Nice! I settled on Goatcounter. It is rather new so even UBlock does not have it built in!

I haven’t used it myself, but I saw that this was released in April: https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet . At least one author is an HN user.

fathom lite (https://github.com/usefathom/fathom) can be self-hosted. We use the pro version https://usefathom.com/ and are happy, especially with their support.

There's a couple more alternatives in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497699

My own solution is AWStats combined with a custom log file anonymizer that I wrote.

https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-...

This will provide stats on unique visitors, most viewed pages, referring sites, etc, whilst protecting the privacy of visitors.

I use server side only, and that is also what I recommend. If wanted, you can program it to reduce what things are logged if the "DNT:1" header is present (and I do this too).

This may not be popular opinion but I like Cloudflare's free plan analytics. It may not be as extensive as Google analytics but for a low traffic blog, should be good enough.

Any reason why you don't want to use Google Analytics?

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