Recommendations please: Self-hosted web site analytics
Hello y'all! I have my personal (static) website / blog running on netlify out on the public internet. Netlify, in case you're not familiar, is not a traditional web host, so I can't add databases or anything else like that on the server itself. Right now, that site has zero analytics / visitor tracking and I've decided I want to fix that. I want to know how many people visited my site and which pages they looked at. I am NOT looking to monetize anything though, to be clear.
I want to self-host that analytics service at home, on my home server, but I need two things, please:
Recommendations for which app to use. I've checked out Umami and Plausible and they both look good for my meager purposes. But please - let me know which app makes sense for a personal web site with low-ish traffic. Is there something simpler I could do?
Help getting the reverse proxy set up so my public web site can send analytics data into my home server. I would prefer this to be entirely under my control, so no CloudFlare or Tailscale, for instance. Is Caddy an option? I get really confused really quickly about this level of networking, to be clear, so maybe I just need a really plain-English guide to handling this sort of thing?
Thanks for any / all ideas! Y'all so totally rock!
ETA: A little more info about Netlify and why I can't install or use tools other traditional web hosts might offer.
** SECOND EDIT**: Thanks to @andrew@radiation.party for the goatcounter suggestion, I am trying that out now for the analytics side of this. Getting it set up was easy and free, using their server. (I know, I know...) If I still like the app after the next couple of weeks, I will move it in-house and self-host. That gives me a couple of weeks to figure out my second issue above, how to have my public web site make requests to my self-hosted, behind the firewall/NAT service. Yay, more learning!
Thanks for this idea - the counting would be easy, but I don't have anywhere to store the numbers. With my free Netlify account and my static web site, I don't have a DB and and can't write to a file when someone visits, at least not that I know of.
Sure but I can't have a HTML or JS file write to any file on my web server directly, so I can't store a number anywhere in Netlify to increment a counter.
My geeky web hoster provides AWStats and GoAccess. Both work by analysing Apache logfiles, so no JavaScript needs to be injected to the pages. Should be more than sufficient to get easy page tracking. (And also catches those visitors that have JavaScript disabled or tracking stuff blocked.)
I used Matomo for a while for a few of my non-monetized sites, and like you, I found it to be just a little too much for small projects. I switched over to Shynet a few years ago - basic, easy to understand, and self-hostable. I noticed it's a lot more accurate than Matomo was, probably because it's on fewer adblock lists. I wouldn't be bothered to see my browser making requests to an instance either since it's pretty respectful of privacy and doesn't collect much.
I spun up Plausible for my company site. Pretty straight forward honestly. It’s completely dockerized so there’s not a lot going on.
Your biggest problem is exposing the service on your home server to the internet. I personally wouldn’t recommend it, but if you know what you’re doing it’s possible.
I'm running Umami on Railway (so not self-hosted), for two small websites. Works pretty well. I think Railway changed their pricing, but I've been grandfathered in with a free plan.
If you do go this route, the best way is to make a fork of the main Umami github repository, then link that to railway. When you want to update, you can just sync new changes to the repo, and railway will rebuild your instance.
If you only want to track the number of page views you can do something simpler.
On your website, add an empty image with a known name in the footer that point to your home server (no proxy needed if your website allows loading images from external site)
You should see the attempt to download the empty image in your home server logs. There are tools to parse your server logs for specific keys (I have Logstash in mind)
If you want to track anything else, just add another empty image linked to the website event you want to track.