counter.dev VS Matomo

> 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. ​

Matomo just released their major v5 upgrade with following key improvements:

There are many good, lightweight, and open-source alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Plausible, Matomo, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and so on. Many of these options are open-source, and can be self-hosted.

You can for example use analytics that aren't spyware, and hence don't even have to try to trick users giving "consent" to things they don't really want.

Seriously: what share of people actually want their behavior to be tracked for ad companies to make more money?

https://matomo.org/

Matomo is a GDPR-compliant and open-source analytics platform. You can either host it yourself or use Matomo’s hosted version. https://matomo.org/

I tried the self-hosted version of Matomo [1][2] a few years back but I remember it was a bit underwhelming for the effort required to set it up.

https://matomo.org

It seems like you just want a self hsoted google analytics. Theres Plausible , Matomo and Umami for that.