goaccess.io for privacy focused website stats

So for this website I wanted to have an easy way to just look up some visitor stats to see if anyone is even reading, or which articles are clicked on the most or where most people come from. Most people use Google Analytics, but that means Google can track every user in detail. I mean… I wanted stats, but not to that extent and not with Google owning all your precious data. I only wanted to see some basic stats and not where you clicked, how much you scrolled or where you moved your mouse.

I wanted it to be a bit more private and I found out about other ways of tracking without abusing the privacy of my visitors. I knew that every server collects logs about you. Essentially the server logs your IP, the referrer, which page you clicked, and your operating system. And that is enough for me. So there are tools that can just create some stats based on that.

Thats how I found out about goaccess which is a visual web log analyzer. It tracks data by using the server logs and displays them nicely in your terminal, which I think is really neat. You can see the total requests, unique visitors, who the referrer is, which page they visited, the average time they stayed, etc.

They also have a nicer web version that runs in your browser, but that was a bit more work to setup and I think the terminal version just looks way cooler.

It was really easy to install. I have a VPS where I host this website and you literally just have to put some small code into your docker and nginx config and it just runs. I am actually kinda in love with it because its so easy and more privacy focused.

I tried it out myself by visiting my articles and it immediately logged the request. It is a bit sad that I wont see any real traffic for probably the next few months until my blog gets a bit more traction, but thats fine, for now I am just using this blog to write about my interests and stuff I learned. Its also good for brainstorming as I really want to start making more youtube videos soon and by writing so much, I actually have already 50% of the video done as writing a script and doing the research or having a topic to make a video about is like half the work.

Takeaway

If you dont want to use google analytics like 90% of websites, just use goaccess if you want a really minimalistic and privacy focused way of getting some stats about your website. There are a ton of other tools like that, I first looked at plausible.io but they charge 9€ / month which is fine and they do also have a self hosted edition but it looked like it would be a bit more work so I just went with goaccess.