So with his own analytics, Cloudflare's server-side analytics, Cloudflare's Analytics script and Google Analytics he's got 4 different measurements now. And according to his follow-up article they all return different results.
yes. server-side must be the most accurate, but I'd still want a good way to filter out bots. for a site with a technical audience any general client side solution is too prone to blocking.
I haven't. The main motivation was to see if I could build an analytics tool, it wasn't really about getting better analytics. Though it was interesting to compare the different tools.
It should be loading just fine, though it is slow at the moment. The good news is that the HN wave didn't cause any errors or break anything, the bad news is that the response time quadrupled and I'm not sure why yet.
If you are looking for something that is a bit more privacy friendly and not a feature overkill, check out Plausible.io (not affiliated, just a happy customer). There is also a self-hosted option.
I've self hosted their analytics and the setup could not be simple enough! Their docs are amazing, the community is active and helpful and the docker upgrade commands are just below their version releases which is super helpful. Really happy with their product.
My main takeaways and why I personally use Plausible are their script is lightweight, it uses no cookies and therefore is by default GDPR compliant and it respects my visitor’s privacy by default. Also a big point, Matomo is way more complex than Plausible and personally overkill for all of my use cases.