Hacker News Reader

Comment by XCSme | Hacker News Reader

https://www.usertrack.net

userTrack is mostly a self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics and Hotjar (heatmaps/session recordings). It also allows for easy A/B testing.

I am the author, ask me anything :)

View on HN

How have you implemented the heatmaps and screen recording - looks like magic

Coupons and Postgres maybe? :)

I don't do really do coupons as the price is already very low at the moment ($99/life or $7.99/month).

I looked a bit into adding Postgres as an option, but it takes some time to recreate the schemas and queries and maintain both DB options. Being on MySQL also makes it a lot easier to install on DigitalOcean, using the LAMP image.

Why would you prefer to have Postgres over MySQL? Is it because you are used to Postgres or because of performance considerations?

I already use Postgres and have infrastructure set up to automate Postgres, optimise it, etc. Performance is generally better (at least IME) than MySQL. json, jsonb types, etc were a decision in choosing Postgres for the rest of my application stacks.

I think it's fine as long as I can get it running on MariaDB 10+ and PHP 7.5 without issues.

I'm interested in a clarification on "Track unlimited websites on one dashboard." - does this software phone home or lock itself down? I usually scale out rather than up, including for personal projects, so "one dashboard" might be running across multiple machines.

> Track unlimited websites on one dashboard

It means that there is one overview page, where you can see last 14 days graphs, 24hours visitors count and number of live visitors for all the websites tracked at once.

> does this software phone home or lock itself down

I am not sure what this means. Currently there is no domain lock, so you can install multiple dashboards on multiple servers. The only "phone home" that it does was recently added, and it just checks the userTrack server for version updates in order to offer one-click updates of the platform.

> usually scale out rather than up

I understand. From what I heard from existing users, performance is really good with userTrack, there are users who get 300k+ monthly sessions on cheap server and performance is good. That being said, the current license allows you to install userTrack on multiple servers (that you own). The only drawback, as mentioned in the first point, is that you will lose the ability to easily see all stats in one place or switch between domain stats in the dashboard.

What is the scale you are expecting to use userTrack at (1k MAU, 100K MAU, 1M+ MAU) ?

I don't know the scale I plan on using it at yet. Matomo started breaking down at a few million pageviews a month.

Is it possible to turn off one click updates completely? I deploy as an immutable application container (I do the same for Wordpress; uploads are written to object storage and database is separate, the actual underlying code "can't change").

To update you have to manually go to settings (enter your license key), click "update", confirm. So there's no risk of accidentally updating, but you will still get the update notifications when a new version is out. I think I could add a setting to disable the update notifications.

You could still scale the dashboard server as it's plain LAMP stack, so you can even separate the DB on one (or multiple servers) and the Apache/PHP on one (or multiple, load balanced servers).

I never tested such setup, as a single server can handle a lot of traffic and don't have yet any enterprise client (that I know of) which has performance issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com