I've been pretty happy with plausible analytics. They have a hosted solution as well.

https://github.com/plausible/analytics

I just enabled Cloudflare web analytics on my site rather than try to figure out Google's new thing. All I care about is tracking visit trends and referrers, and that's actually way easier in Cloudflare's UI so I'm happy.

One nice thing about it is that there are some pages on my site that I never bothered to add Google Analytics to, but Cloudflare adds their tracker automatically to every page. It couldn't be easier, which is great as analytics is not something I want to spend any time on.

My experience with cloudflare is that it counts every bot as a visitor, so Facebook pinging your site 5000 times in a day shows as 5000 United States visitors - not so useful to analyze. Is it different nowadays?

This is their web analytics product which is different from their server side statistics. I'm not sure which one you're talking about.

Then I was probably remembering the server side statistics.

I think I will be checking out Cloudflare too since I'm unhappy with GA and I am not eager to run my own analytics platform.

... but if I wanted to run my own platform I wonder what other people are using.

Both self-hosted and hosted Plausible are a good choice.

Only the server where the platform is installed has to be PHP, the tracked websites can be anything.

What is wrong with PHP? Most hosting companies support it by default or come with LAMP images, so installation is often trivial.

Nothing really wrong with PHP or Matomo, which is why I mention it as something I would recommend. But, it is a requirement for hosting Matomo.

I would pick a different stack today mostly due to wanting to try other stuff out, and not so much because something was broken about it. Website still loads faster than 99% of the internet today, and I'm happy with it.

My point was that Matomo is PHP, but your website doesn't have to be on the same stack.

Normally the analytics platform should be hosted on a separate server for performance and security reasons.

For example, the demo dashboard of uxwizz.com runs on PHP/MySQL on a $5/mo VPS and it's faster than most analytics platforms, even those running on big cloud infrastructures, because for the low-traffic use-case the simpler the solution and technology, the better.

I assumed that if you are self hosting, that you don't bother using a separate hosting provider for just analytics. I should probably not have suggested anything other than "matomo is nice". The technical requirements are fairly obvious, and my extra information was just easy to misinterpret. I'm sure people can figure it out. Have a nice day

Fathom and plausible are nice.

Wide Angle Analytics

Shynet

self hosted plausible