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An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
211–220 of 311 posts
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#212For those interested, my own solution to this was to use AWStats with an anonymization script [1].
It provides high-level analytics such as unique visitors, referring sites and most viewed pages, without having to store any personal data such as IP addresses, and it's 100% server-side.
IP addresses are compared against a Bloom filter in order to count unique visitors, without actually permanently storing them.
[1] https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-...
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
No idea if that's true or not regarding Google Analytics, but you can opt out of all data sharing and I imagine Google would be in a lot of trouble if they didn't honour that.
There is no comprehensive opt out to Google tracking. If you disagree, show me the button that opts out of doubleclick (and all Google subsidiaries and data sharing partners) targeting ads at my home IP address, cell phone, car, etc.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth I find it minorly annoying when people send me emails about my posts. I'm happy for people to comment on them, but typically an email is an invitation to have a private discussion and I'd much rather talk publicly ( https://www.jefftk.com/p/comment-dont-message )
You may get more comments/emails than I do. I think I've gotten 3 worthwhile comments and 2 emails in the 8 years my blog has been active. I actually turned comments off, because I was getting thousands of spam daily, and that seems like a waste of everyone's time.
I host my comments externally. For example, https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh is currently on the HN frontpage as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810589, and I think of that like my comment section. I have my blog pull in the comments from there: https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh#hn-22811119
I also pull comments from LessWrong and Facebook, though the FB comment integration is pretty temperamental.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#215If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.
I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.
The blog seemed to very intentionally not mention the company's product until the very end. They should have led with that.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#216Can you be penalized for not running Google Analytics? If you have a website with no analytics or non-Google analytics, will your Google ranking be worse?
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#217Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features. While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at $6 only. I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives. Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation…
I think everyone is so negative on the post because the post is a sleazy ad in disguise. If it had opened with "these are the reasons that we are unsatisfied with analytics which led us to launch our own alternate service, plausible" or even just "why we made plausible.io" then we would know up front that it's an ad but maybe still a worthwhile read. This hides the fact that they want you to maybe try plausible to th…
Where's the sleaze? GA does shady shit, Plausible has a competitor product and they're making the pitch on their company blog. What am I missing?
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#218I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…
Have you looked at using Amazon Lightsail?
Linux VM for $3.50/month: 512 MB RAM, 1 processor core, 20 GB SSD, 1 TB/month outgoing transfer. For $5/month: 1 GB RAM, 1 processor core, 40 GB SSD, 2 TB/month outgoing transfer.
Should be enough for a hobby blog, especially if static.
They have images for Amazon Linux, two Ubuntu versions, two Debian versions, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE, and CentOS.
They also have a few images with various things preinstalled and preconfigured: WordPress; Joomla; Drupal; Django.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#219Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features. While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at $6 only. I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives. Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation…
>plausible is Open Source
>self hosting is not supported
Ok, then how do you prove it's open source?
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.
>They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything. Wtf, this is the opposite of "up front." You had to poke around and figure it out yourself based on a suspicion. Up front means that they just tell you, no figuring out required.
I didn't poke around. I knew by the time I finished reading the Table of Contents, before I even got to the content.
Even if they had said in their very first sentence of the content "Disclaimer: We are a competitor to Google Analytics", I would have already known before that.
It's blatantly obvious, they didn't need to spoon feed me. This isn't some submarine article.