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I removed Google Analytics from my website a week ago. Still can't find a static-site host with server-side analytics with decent retention but in the mean time there's no reason to send your data to Google. Hopefully you all were blocking it anyway.
Next up: Google Fonts.
101 replies and sub-replies as of Jun 09 2020
I don't want to manage it myself. Would prefer to pay someone. Otherwise I'll probably just skip analytics altogether. Historically I've only used it for extremely high-level counts to estimate reach on performance reviews.
is there any special reason for removing it?
Performance and privacy. Win-win.
so do i need to remove it from my mobile apps for the user privacy?
I think he recently left
Quit 5 weeks ago. When I was there I worked on open source things on Android, never their proprietary products. Google has been slowly rotting for years from their products outward.
Yep. In fact, they're now my employer... again.
It's amazing juat how bad their search has become.
Can you please fix Firebase?
😜
Firebase is built for infinite scale but only supports 200 composite indexes (i.e. indexes on 2+ fields).
Sometimes it seems like the geniuses at Google are trolling us. There's dozens more examples.
What are you using to host your blog? I noticed you were ok to pay, if so Netlify could be the provider you're looking for
Currently GitHub Pages for production and Netlify for staging. From what I understand Netlify only does 30 day retention.
I see. I also read somewhere about the idea to load a fake image from a serverless or owned server to easily have server side analytics outside your main hosting but didn't really investigate it.
Have you considered hosting your own Open Web Analytics server?
Backtrace give you analytics that you can host, if I'm correct.
Hmm poking around I only see a client-side library and nothing for server-side.
Oh, my bad! I thought they premium plan give you the change to do it.
See if clicky.com/compare/ meets you needs. Have used them in the past and was happy with their pricing and quality.
This is client-side and runs on user's computers. I'm looking for server-side which runs on the host that serves the files.
Thanks for the shoutout Alan.
Hey Jake - We've been doing privacy-focused analytics since 2018. First on the scene and leader in the space. Fully bootstrapped, profitable & actively rejecting venture capital ;) Please let us (@pjrvs / @JackEllis) know if you have any questions!
Thanks! I'm actually looking for something server-side rather than client-side, but I very much appreciate your effort for client-side users.
Gotcha. If you run into frustrations with bot traffic, and fancy taking Fathom for a spin (with your own custom domain), just let us know. Best of luck, Jake :)
If you you front it with CloudFlare, CloudFlare provides sufficient analytics information.
Doesn't seem like they have anything by page. Otherwise it would be perfect.
Allow me to nerd swipe you into intercepting all requests with a Cloudflare Worker and saving page views in a Workers KV database 😬
Hah! I saw you can do this. Could even call out to a normal cloud analytics service maybe.
It's really quite cool! I built msfjarvis.dev/g/redirekt with Workers to learn the ropes of TypeScript (still not a fan, sadly). I suggested Workers KV since I assume that's gonna be the lowest latency option and since the basic plan has something like 10k entries you can go wild.
msfjarvis/redirekt
Super simple Cloudflare Worker that handles some redirections for me - msfjarvis/redirekt
github.com
Damn.. is this diss to Google? LOL
This is client side as far as I understand but did you check out matomo.org ?
Matomo: Complete Analytics. 100% Yours.
Enjoy the full benefits of a Premium Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization tool ALL in one place, while taking full control with 100% data ownership.
matomo.org
Yeah it used to be called Piwik. While they offer a hosted version you still send them your data and it doesn't host the site. So I would need to use a host that provided server-side logs and then figure out how to ship them over. But then I could just host it locally for free.
Have you looked at goaccess.io ? I haven’t tried it but it looks like it could do server-side analytics
GoAccess - Visual Web Log Analyzer
GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.
goaccess.io
Looks very nice. I was hoping to avoid having to host myself though. Starting to seem inevitable.
Yeah, I couldn’t find any static site hosts that had reasonable server-side analytics either 😞 guess that is the next start-up idea
Wut about firebase analytics and crashlytics ?
Do u use that ?
I use Bugsnag in my apps
acra is also good option
is a phenomenal product, invaluable error insights.
I prefer using @Instabug for bug reporting and crash reporting!
Is there any alternative to Google fonts?
Did you tried @matomo_org? Can be hosted on own infrastructure.
I have but I'd prefer not to have to self host because that also means I need to host the webserver.
who are you kidding? We all know you are going to build it yourself 🙂
We have been using @PostHogHQ too. The updates are just amazing.
Looks like client-side analytics. I'm trying to find a host that offers good server-side. Thanks for the suggestion though!
Fathom Analytics I think it's called...
Netlify Analytics and Shotgun Analytics come to mind. Both server side. Netlify's is a bit more rudimentary though.
So now which Tool will you use to Get Analaytics of your website?
Also interested!
I have removed it years ago never looked back. Congratulations on the move. I have been using my cdn logs to estimate my traffic. Also, g webmaster toolkit since it most people use google anyway.
Jake, I know you said those might not be for you, but in case someone else might be interested, I've compiled a short list of the tools that I know of:
Self-Hosted Analytics Tools
Here are a few self-hosted Google Analytics alternatives that I know of. What else must make it into this list? Let me know. Fast, simple and privacy-focused website analytics Fathom Analytics is simple, GDPR compliant website analytic tool, no cookie notice required. No tracking or storing personal data of your users. https://usefathom.com | Created with Linqable GoatCounter web analytics Easy web analytics.
preslav.me
I've personally switched to using goatcounter.com by @arp242_martin and I am quite happy with it.
Not exactly a solution right now but the Plausible creators are committing to server-side analytics as well.
De-Google-ing your website analytics with Marko Saric & Uku Täht (The Changelog #396)
Plausible creators Uku Täht and Marko Saric join the show to talk about their open source, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We talk through the backstory of the project, why it’s open source, the details behind a few viral blog posts Marko shared to bring in a ton of new interest to the project, why pr...
changelog.com
It doesn't auto play, but the link points to the 49 min mark where they talk about server-side pros & cons.
Thanks for spreading the word Leandro! Definitely something that we'd love to do and it's on the roadmap.
Bot traffic is a big issue with server-side. Stats are largely inflated so there's a lot of noise in the data. We'll see what we can figure out.
You can try @Netlify analytics, it's server side along with hosting, great product but it's not free.
I came across this amazing repository while searching for self-hosted tools, Please have a look:
awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally. Selfhosting is the process of hosting and managing applications instead of renting from Software-as-a-Serv...
github.com
Be aware while integration third parties in your projects. You might give a way to hackers !
I use @Netlify . Being honest I find the analytics package a bit expensive but seems the be the best alternative.
Vercel + Fathom
If you're looking to host static sites, try netlify. I haven't set up analytics, but it looks like it can do pagewise.
Netlify Analytics | Netlify
See what we see—Netlify Analytics brings you data captured directly from our servers, presented simply and beautifully.
netlify.com
They do! But they only do 30-day retention. I was hoping for more like 6 months or a year.
You have seen some shit, haven't you.
If moving away from google, why not try it’s rival?
Yandex.Metrica — free All-Round Web Analytics: session replay, heat maps and form analytics combined with advanced reporting tools
Yandex metriсa
metrica.yandex.com
I'm looking for server-side analytics, not another client-side solution.
Hi, Jake. last week I was asking for help if anyone could recommend some open source projects I coul work on. I deleted the tweet a few hours later as I thought it as a stupid question. I hope you can give me some piece of advice though
Are you going to deGoogle your phone too? AOSP without Google services or just switch to iOS?
I used Lexiconn - lexiconn.com for my server host for almost 10 years in my e-comm business. They have excellent server side analytics and offer a few different, robust options. Highly recommended!
I’m wondering what you saw at google to be so against google tracking and tools 🤔🙈
For the fonts front. What ar story thoughts on Adobe 😊?
I'm moving everything to be served directly. No CDNs. HTTP/2 already meant that their benefit was reduced, but browsers are basically killing them altogether: jefftk.com/p/shared-cache…
Nor sure if relevant but @pjrvs has been doing some amazing work on @usefathom – might be worth a look!
How about @matomo_org?
Does CloudFlare not preserve their analytics? I ripped out GA and figured I could just use their cdn analytics.
It's not per-page which seems to be what Jake wants
Yeah their analytics are great to get for free but there's no breakdown per-page. I want to be able to see which posts do better than others.
True, I had noticed that. For static sites I wonder how helpful that really is as opposed to just using nginx and parsing logs.
That's precisely what I want to pay for. I just don't want to be responsible for keeping it running since I already have enough to deal with. It seems crazy to me that static-site hosts don't have anything like this.
We've used cloudfront logs for this at work.
It's in your nature to build something on your own I guess 😂😂😂
i want to remove it too. I couldn't find a conjugate that gives great details for dummy users. In addition, it is much easier with google to pull the data into my own server & tables which is processing big data. If you give me an advise, i will be pleased
How about @yandexmetrika ?
I made a hand drawn font. I will license it to you for free. Slide into my DMs for Sloppy DG Sans.otf
Serving an S3 bucket through Cloud front, log cloudfront activity in S3, query in your logs with aws Athena. Geek, but managed, you've only got to write the queries you want :)