this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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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:

  1. 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?

  2. 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!

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[–] mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.)

[–] perishthethought@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My web provider doesn't offer anything like that or what they do offer, they charge quite a lot for.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk 1 points 7 months ago

Does your provider not give you access to the webserver log files?