JackWritesCode

Fathom Lite is self-hosted. Lots of people start off self-hosting but it’s typically useful for people with low traffic, or for people whose time is worth less than money, or even those who enjoy it. Because you have to maintain anything you self-host. We like to cater for both.

So glad you love it :)

We’ve been building this as an option too. It’s a cool feature that a lot of people will like. Good luck

Less companies are focusing on user level tracking, as it’s an invasion of privacy and compliance doesn’t allow it

That means a lot, thank you. We’ve been running Farhom since 2018, and we’ve put a lot of thought into the user experience :)

Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics and bring up compliance challenges (storing access logs and using them for purposes other than security etc.)

Of course. Fathom filters bots on the client side and then looks for bot signs on the server. If it looks questionable, it doesn’t process it.

Just be sure to check with your legal team regarding using web logs for analytics purposes

Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you’ll see how unreliable they really are.

For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom’s custom domain feature has done really well for the majority: https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code

The Fathom one isn’t accurate and references an old article. I’ll submit a PR in a few weeks if I remember :)

Thanks James. You wait till we launch V3 ;)

I wrote about this a few days ago on how I did this with Caddy: https://laravel-news.com/unlimited-custom-domains-vapor

DNT has been abandoned, so we don't support it by default, but you can honor it by adding honor-dnt="true" to your script.

We don’t share that stance. Most people install ad-blockers to block dodgy advertisers, Facebook and other privacy-invasive websites.

Hey, thanks for the shoutout. We're a great option for so many reasons but here are a few recent things"

* We allow our users to bypass ad-blockers and exclude themselves from tracking their own page views (https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code)

* We are both full time on Fathom, bootstrapped (we've turned down millions in VC) and profitable (https://usefathom.com/blog/quit)

* We are adding in unlimited uptime monitoring on Friday (SMS, Telegram, Slack and email notifications)

* We run on auto-scaling infrastructure and are used by individuals, small businesses, governments and some of the biggest companies in the world

Bypassing ad-blockers is simple enough, just roll your own custom domain. I'm working on a blog post that covers how we (Fathom) did this with Caddy as a multi-region reverse proxy

Absolutely not. Deep dive here: https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo

Fathom has been investing a lot of $ in legal / privacy consultants recently. Excited for the next steps :)

We've had great fun with Caddy for Version 1 of our custom domains feature.

For Version 2, we've done a lot of work with Matt and the solution we've now reached is:

1. DynamoDB as storage for certificates, allowing sharing between servers without regenerating during an issue with an availability zone

2. Multiple Caddy reverse proxy servers in different regions

3. AWS Global Accelerator to route the user to the closet server to them

It's so great because we can also proxy our CDN through Caddy (yes, it needs to go through the user's custom domain), and we've got insanely fast response times on that.

We've load tested the proxy servers and they can handle an incredible amount, we're very pleased with the solution.

I will be publishing and sharing an article soon, detailing my journey and our final solution.

Huge fan of Caddy. The on-demand TLS is incredible.

This is the kind of thing we need to be thinking about. A clear opt-in.

Yeah - privacy is important to the author. Less data points but protecting users' privacy.

I enjoy Justin's fresh approach to a lot of these business topics. When you hear "margin" you immediately think of profit, never your personal margin. Funny because you need personal margin to actually sit back, let your mind calm down and allow new business ideas / strategy etc. to float up.

Fair enough, point taken. We could've named Google in the title.

We collect total page views, total uniques, browsers, countries, device types and goal hits in aggregate.

Privacy started becoming more important when we started seeing the gross tactics companies used to identify you & link all of your actions / history to you. Fathom doesn't do this and never will.

Keep pushing man. We're getting between 300ms - 600ms response from your endpoint (from a single datacenter) but I wish you luck with hitting under 90ms average.

That line needs updating as it doesn't apply to people running it serverless. That was aimed at the DO users who need to power down to upgrade.

And we're not in a position to offer a free plan but may do in the future.

It applies to big tech.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches etc.

Appreciate the honest review :)

I'd say it's both, snickerbockers. Google Analytics wasn't built with privacy in mind and Google is in the advertising business primarily.