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Comment by maple3142 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't work if the website is hosted on GitHub Pages or Netlify. Having a CDN such as CloudFlare will make log files on your server useless too.

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Netlify offers an add-on for server-side analytics: https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/

The frustrating thing is that it's cheaper at that point to run a Linode or Do instance for $5/mo where you get full logs than to pay $9/mo for Netlify analytics.

It's not a perfect comparison but I am still on the lookout for the cheapest way to host a static site while retaining access to access logs.

How so? Isn't that just for pictures and other media?

Hosting a (static) website on GitHub pages means you put all your resources including html files into a repo, then the whole website will be served from GitHub's server. You don't even have a server to view your access log. Netlify is pretty similar.

As for CloudFlare, all the requests will go through CloudFlare's server for caching, so some request won't reach your server.

> As for CloudFlare, all the requests will go through CloudFlare's server for caching, so some request won't reach your server.

Only for static files, they don't cache HTML and dynamic contents. So you can still make sense of unique visitors to your site.

That really depends on your setup. The cache whatever you tell them to cache. HTML and dynamic content is also cacheable with good results. For example you can vary the cache by the user ID cookie. Or for dynamic content you can in most cases do caching for 5min or so.

Goatcounter works on netlify, it's pretty neat.

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