Ask HN: What do you use to track visitors on your blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use to track visitors on your blog?

15 pointsolzhasar23 comments

I recently reanimated my blog and I would like to add analytics to it. I don't want to mess with user contents, are there any free alternatives to GA that one can use?

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If you plan to sell ads on the blog or sell the blog itself at a future point of time, you will need to use some company acceptable to them. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, ....

If it is just to know more about your visitors, then there are plenty of options.

Piwik (now named as Matomo) is a very popular open-source option. I would argue, it is the most popular one out there. If you run into a problem, you will find support out there.

If you use a CDN like CloudFlare, they provide analytics sometimes, like Cloudflare Web Analytics.

If you use a shared web host, most of them support AWStats or something similar, where you can find out more about your visitors.

If you like tinkering with stuff, use an open source option.

If you want a free option, choose an open source option or go with CDN-provided or host-provided options.

If you want to run with minimal fuss, choose one of the popular options.

If you want to write one yourself, pick one from Github, fork and get going. It is not too difficult. I have written one from scratch once and used to use it on my sites, and it wasn't too difficult.

Nowadays affiliate marketing often replaces ads. I never had any issues with Plausible and advertisers.

Umami, self-hosted, but they also have a cloud version with a free tier if you prefer that.

https://github.com/umami-software/umami

AWstats [1] on an isolated machine. I just pull down logs to it from each node to keep logs off the live servers. It is included in many Linux distributions as well. AWStats should be behind strong authentication if exposing on a public web server.

[1] - https://awstats.sourceforge.io/

Tinybird is perfect, I use it for a couple of months. The interface is clear, minimalist, and easy to use. https://www.tinybird.co/starter-kits/web-analytics

+1 for Tinybird

Wide Angle Analytics!

If you make proper discolures in your privacy policy and use our default, strong privacy cookieless settings, you won't need cookie banner and consent form.

https://wideangle.co

https://counter.dev/

Don't need advanced use cases, not interested in monetization. Counter.dev got me because:

- it's simple

- respects users' privacy

- has a pay-what-you-want model

Looks cool. Thank you for that!

I just use CloudFront access logs stored in an S3 bucket. When needed I query through Athena, but eventually it'd be nice to get some kind of visual report generated as well.

Is your blog on WordPress? Then check out WPLytic[0], there is a lifetime promotion running currently.

[0]: https://wplytic.com

Plausible on the website I live from, and nothing on my personal blog. I don't need to know who visits my personal blog, so I prefer not to know.

If on wp, try

https://www.kokoanalytics.com/

If you really need to track visitors the best way is through nginx log files.

All other tracking methods is an invasion of privacy.

Are you self-hosting? Or is there a convenient host that provides logs?

I think NearlyFreeSpeech.net provides logs, and the service is pretty cheap. My only complaint is that the pages don’t load super fast.

Do you know a good way to wrangle access logs into anything resembling metrics? Uniques etc?

GoAccess works just fine.

Grafana Loki is great for that.

TY!

Nothing at all. Partly because of the privacy issue and also because I can’t be bothered to learn the tooling.

Webalyzer.

It's all bots trying to find wordpress exploits that aren't there.

Plausible.

Please don't track anyone. If you just want to count visitors, then Simple Analytics is good.

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