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Ask HN: How do you track your blog traffic?

15 points by Gehinnn ↗ HN
I'm about to publish my statically hosted dev blog and I am wondering what tracking solution I should use.

My first choice still would be Google Analytics, however, I don't like the idea of including Google spyware in my blog that much. Besides, many adblockers are blocking Google Analytics and most developers use an adblocker.

I would like to see how much traffic specific articles get and where the visitors come from.

What do you use for your blog?

23 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] thread
Tomte
I'd recommend web server log analysis with GoAccess or AWStats.
Gehinnn
I don't have access to the server logs as I intend to use github pages for hosting...
kgraves
As much as I absolutely detest spying and surveillance capitalism, this is the _least_ invasive solution, but please remove or anonymize ALL IPs in your logs.

Other than that I would not log, track or collect any requests from people.

dredmorbius
Keeping IPs for a short time -- 24 hours to 7 days, say -- is useful for detecting and mitigating abuse.

Though tools for automated throttling or simply front-ending behind a DDoS-capable CDN may be a preferred option.

KhalPanda
I use, and quite like, Matomo (formerly Piwik).

https://matomo.org/

Gehinnn
It took a ton of time and a lot of troubleshooting to setup my own Matomo instance, but it's running now ;) Thanks for your input! However, I needed to rewrite some files so that adblockers don't block the tracking mechanism right away.
dylz
This seems a bit disrespectful considering how you don't like "spyware"
lukaszkups
I'm using CloudFlare - I know it won't be so detailed as Google Analytics but I don't mind.
bbno4
https://simpleanalytics.com/ is the best for privacy focused, cheap analytics :)
Gehinnn
As my blog is just a personal project, $9 is a little too much for me just for tracking.
jackcodes
Front it with cloudflare and you’ll get request analytics for free.
AlchemistCamp
I use my logs and Keen.io (from the back-end). It's more accurate than an external service like GA. Even if a visitor's browser has JS disabled entirely, it still gets counted.

I filter out certain kinds of visits (such as bots) from the dashboards I look at regularly.

The only problem is that since Keen got acquired they've quietly stopped letting people sign up for their free plan and greatly increased the prices of their paid plans. It's probably only a matter of time before I lose access to my current plan and need to find an alternative.

cloudytoday
personal blog or for work?
Gehinnn
personal blog :)
cloudytoday
yeah haven't tried that yet outside of using blog platforms like Blogger (yes I'm that old haha) or Medium so don't have additional analytics implemented
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clusmore
I rolled my own. I have an Azure function that I post the pathname and referrer to, and it then stores that in Table storage. It costs me between 1 and 2 cents per month.
ryacko
Apache with Analog Analytics is good.
admils
Apache with Analog Analytics is good.