251–260 of 311 posts
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It's on the company's own blog under their own domain. It's not like this is a submarine article or the like. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Sure, but I had no idea the company was an analytics company until the last paragraph. I clicked on the article from HN.
What are good self-hosted alternatives? Something like Webalizer, but a bit more modern.
"Nobody was fired for using Google Analytics" (c) Is financial burden to change any part of your product, including GA, and 99.99% of all companies in the world don't give a damn about users of their products, so it will never happen unless some global power restructure happens and Google will fall out of grace. And even then most likely it will be simply replaced with even worse GA-2.
I would say that 99.99% of businesses do give a damn about their customers. And particularly they care about their customers' preferences as demonstrated by their economic behavior. Very few customers care whether a business uses GA enough to change their purchasing decisions. Businesses therefore rightly view the decision as neutral with respect to customer preferences.
I 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…
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There's a big blue button at the top of the page that says "Start Free Trial". Click it and you get this: - Quick and easy to set up - No credit card required - Unlimited use during the trial - From just $6/mo after the trial Looks like a flat fee? Hard to tell from that wording. They should make this more visible on the front-page and elaborate on the " from just $6/mo".
Pricing can be seen at https://plausible.io/#pricing 6$ / month for a personal website. 12$ / month for a startup. 36$ / month for a business.
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> "[GA]...doesn't have creepy features that let you spy on individual users" google reserves that for itself so as not to lose it's dominance of online advertising and targeting. why would they share their bread and butter with the little guys?
They made a statement within the last few years that they don't use GA data for their own purposes. The scarier implication is they don't need GA to understand web trends. They can collect far more data using Chrome, AMP, Android, Ads, and more.
What are good self-hosted alternatives? Something like Webalizer, but a bit more modern.
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Photoshop is the defacto-standard in image editing, yet clones which are free and copy the photoshop UI are rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com If someone set up a Scroogle Analoytics which had a simple code snippet, was free, and had near-identical looking dashboard, I'd use it.
In general, you should be very careful about what third parties you allow on your page because you're delegating to them the ability to do anything that can be done from JS. I trust Google to take this seriously and not open me up to XSS, but I would be much more skeptical about Scroogle Analoytics. (Disclosure: I work for Google, and have run Google Analytics on my site since before I joined)
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I would say that 99.99% of businesses do give a damn about their customers. And particularly they care about their customers' preferences as demonstrated by their economic behavior. Very few customers care whether a business uses GA enough to change their purchasing decisions. Businesses therefore rightly view the decision as neutral with respect to customer preferences.
That customer model is a mental construct of said companies. Just because customer does not proactively ask/request/mention something don't mean that he doesn't care about this. People implicitly assume that their personal information is not used for malicious purposes, despite that it is not true anymore for most of the companies. And in the era of monopolies/doupolies customers don't have vote with their wallet any…
> That customer model is a mental construct of said companies.
Well enough, but as I said, it's the one they care about. You seem to have a dualist view of customers where there are some things they care about that do affect economic behavior, and others they care about but which do not affect their economic behavior. I don't buy that model. I prefer the monist model where in competitive markets the customer expresses the totality of their preferences through economic behavior. I know it's incorrect, like all models, but I think it's least incorrect.
I doubt there's more than a tiny fraction of customers that even knows the existence of Google Analytics. Of them, only a small fraction of those has any idea of its capabilities. And of those customers, only an even smaller fraction even checks whether a site is using it before deciding whether to shop. The notion that a large fraction of customers care about the use of GA just doesn't fit with these other observations and conjectures. Please correct me with data if you think I'm wrong.
And anyway, whether you're right or me, the monist model encompasses everything companies have any incentive to care about, so it's the one that will be used to drive decisions. It's also the one that we can use to predict company behavior.
Plausible, 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…
Matamo is free, OSS, and takes just a few minutes to install. https://matomo.org/
I do not see hosted analytics as real competition to GA since you have the same privacy problems.
Self-hosting should be the preferred option.