minimal-analytics, one year later

Started tracking pageviews on s.cri.dev with minimal-analytics at the beginning of May 2021.

Here I wanted to share a story about a simple self-hosting solution for tracking website users in a privacy-friendly, cookie-less, gdpr-compliant way.

Oh well, and happy birthday minimal-analytics 🎂

110k pageviews

After 1 year of tracking, minimal-analytics tracked 110k pageviews to this very blog.

Check it out at s.cri.dev

Out of ~105k visitors and ~115k pageviews, 75k+ come from google.

That’s a solid piece of traffic from google.

A small 7k come from duckduckgo.

The bounce rate is around 91%.

The traffic is increasing, month to month, starting with ~7k visitors a month to ~10k in July 2022.

A rough 40% increase.

Hosting

My minimal-analytics instance, hosted at s.cri.dev, is running on a small Linode VPS, 1GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 25GB SSD.

For 5$ a month, it’s been a good deal and experience for me.

I am using docker-compose and nginx, cloudflare as cache, dns & domain.

Here the instructions for self-hosting minimal-analytics

The experiment goes on

A JSONL file as a DB to track visitors.

Hash the ip, url and a seed to compute a quite unique visitor hash.

All on the server, without cookies, with minimal JavaScript involved.

That is the idea behind minimal-analytics, and I am planning to extend it further:

• more granular referrer breakdowns (e.g. aggregate all google.* sites)
• allow embedding into iframes/images
• improve chart visualization

And if you want to contribute to the project, file an issue or pull-request here on github