counter.dev VS GoatCounter

> Rather than what looks to be an unproven pet project of some developer. If nobody is paying for it, there are no guarantees of uptime or support.

It's pay what you want. The project is running for three years already, let's see how things go with time.

Apologies for the long downtime. The issue is being resolved, see here for updates:

- https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev/issues/124

- counter.dev -> Something that I need but it has a lack of accuracy and very tiny functionality.

> Right, and being sessionStorage it's cleared on browser close, and the next time I visit I will be counted as another daily unique visitor right?

No! There are a few rudimentary mechanisms on top of each other if one of them fails as you described. The /track endpoint sets up http caching. So if sessionStorage fails, you still have that. Then there is also inspecting document.referrer. If it is the page you are already on, then it's definitely not a unique visit.

> (or why not just a cookie)

Because cookies are considered "bad". But technically basically just saving a boolean value on the cookie would not be worse from a privacy perspective than using sessionStorage for a boolean value.

> I personally would rather have the pages I visit use a self-hosted solution gather everything I do, instead of a third-party getting little data from many sites I use. If this script is used across many sites it can be checked server-side against my IP to get my usage. I can never verify what logs they keep and for how long.

That is a general problem with externally hosted services. You can audit the source code (https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev) but there is not way to verify that my deployment is as stated. I heard a podcast once that web hosters could guarantee that a deployment is in a specific way and contains a specific code base revision. But such solutions unfortunately do not exist. If you really want to be sure self hosting is the way to go (but somewhat cumbersome)

I think you can go with counter.dev

I am providing a free and open source web analytics service: https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev / counter.dev

From their Github. ​

GoatCounter — GoatCounter is an open-source web analytics platform available as a hosted service (free for non-commercial use) or self-hosted app. It aims to offer easy-to-use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo. The free tier is for non-commercial use and includes unlimited sites, six months of data retention, and 100k pageviews/month.

> Not sure when GoatCounter started

"Hello, world" - arp242 committed on May 28, 2019 - 66a4d7f9b7af8dccacaf3ad8a9fb57a9f9008030 - https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/commit/66a4d7f9b7af8dc...

Location: Ireland (Galway)

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

Email: [email protected]

I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/

I suggest using analytics that you can self-host, like https://www.goatcounter.com/ and renting a cheap vm to run it on along with your blog. It is way better, you have more control and you can be sure that javascript tracking is working for 100% of people using the site since you have full control over it not getting blocked by adblockers.

I'm self-hosting GoatCounter and using it across all my websites.

Apart from controlling my data, I also have more accurate visitor statistics, as it doesn't get picked up by script blockers, unlike GA.

https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter

https://www.goatcounter.com

I first used basic google analytics but found it too invasive/heavy so I switched over to https://www.goatcounter.com/.

For comments, most solutions were also too heavy, paid or had ads, but I finally found https://giscus.app/.

So while I did add these 2 features, I'm happy with those variants that I managed to find.

Location: Ireland

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

Email: [email protected]

I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/