Hello y’all! I have my personal (static) website / blog running on netlify out on the public internet. Netlify, in case you’re not familiar, is not a traditional web host, so I can’t add databases or anything else like that on the server itself. Right now, that site has zero analytics / visitor tracking and I’ve decided I want to fix that. I want to know how many people visited my site and which pages they looked at. I am NOT looking to monetize anything though, to be clear.

I want to self-host that analytics service at home, on my home server, but I need two things, please:

  1. Recommendations for which app to use. I’ve checked out Umami and Plausible and they both look good for my meager purposes. But please - let me know which app makes sense for a personal web site with low-ish traffic. Is there something simpler I could do?

  2. Help getting the reverse proxy set up so my public web site can send analytics data into my home server. I would prefer this to be entirely under my control, so no CloudFlare or Tailscale, for instance. Is Caddy an option? I get really confused really quickly about this level of networking, to be clear, so maybe I just need a really plain-English guide to handling this sort of thing?

Thanks for any / all ideas! Y’all so totally rock!

ETA: A little more info about Netlify and why I can’t install or use tools other traditional web hosts might offer.

** SECOND EDIT**: Thanks to @[email protected] for the goatcounter suggestion, I am trying that out now for the analytics side of this. Getting it set up was easy and free, using their server. (I know, I know…) If I still like the app after the next couple of weeks, I will move it in-house and self-host. That gives me a couple of weeks to figure out my second issue above, how to have my public web site make requests to my self-hosted, behind the firewall/NAT service. Yay, more learning!

  • anguoEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I’m running Umami on Railway (so not self-hosted), for two small websites. Works pretty well. I think Railway changed their pricing, but I’ve been grandfathered in with a free plan.

    Edit: all of my websites are also on Netlify.

    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Thank you for this. I will definitely check out Railway.

      ETA: I checked out Railway and their $5 a month plan is still more than I can spend rn. But I will keep them in mind for future uses.

      • anguoEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        If you do go this route, the best way is to make a fork of the main Umami github repository, then link that to railway. When you want to update, you can just sync new changes to the repo, and railway will rebuild your instance.