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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

> it isn’t a managed SaaS product. It’s open source software purpose-built to self-host on Cloudflare’s developer cloud, in such a way that anyone can do it.

This doesn't sound like self-hosting, it sounds like self-operated.

Is it possible to run Counter scale on-prem against logs from HAProxy, Nginx, or Apache? That would be cool, and is the benchmark because AWStats [0] has been around for decades and works just fine.

There's also a newcomer called Plausible which has a FOSS Community Edition [1] which can be self-hosted.

[0] https://awstats.sourceforge.io/

[1] https://github.com/plausible/community-edition/

Edit: @xorcist Thank you for the recommendations, I'll check them out.

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If there is a "benchmark" for open source analytics, it's probably Matomo.org which has been around for a long time and is a standard PHP app you can just deploy. It's normally run with javascript tracking to do things like lead tracking, onboarding, campaigns and such. It can also ingest logs but with loss of that functionality.

AWstats hasn't been updated since the times when screens were tiny. Try GoAccess for a more modern look (it has nothing to do with the Go language) but still a bog standard static log analyzer that can generate HTML reports periodically.

> Is it possible to run Counter scale on-prem against logs from HAProxy, Nginx, or Apache?

Probably. But it's not for that use case (for example, Counterscale intentionally strips IP addresses).

> There's also a newcomer called Plausible which has a FOSS Community Edition [1] which can be self-hosted.

One of the goals of Counterscale is that you can deploy it "fire and forget" with a single terminal command.

Contrast this to Plausible CE, which makes it clear you need some basic adminstrative skills to operate the software:

> you should have a basic understanding of the command-line and networking to successfully set it up

The point is that Counterscale is designed differently than traditional "self-hosted" solutions in order to promote ease of deploy. It comes with serious constraints (like a dependency on Cloudflare). But some people may prefer those tradeoffs.

Maybe self-operated is better terminology -- that's fair. (Though I think one of the key points is that there is almost nothing to operate.)

For me, the fundamental issue is whether I am controlling what code is out there, I'm paying the pure infrastructure costs, etc. So whether it's self-hosted or self-operated doesn't matter.

For some it sounds like if you aren't managing it at the operating system level then it isn't self-hosted.

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