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Google's spying hurts your users. To manage your webserver, use your server logs. If you really think you need more information than those convey, you could g

by nfoz 12y ago

Google's spying hurts your users. To manage your webserver, use your server logs. If you really think you need more information than those convey, you could get some self-hosted javascript to assist with that. You need nothing else.

ddebernardy 12y ago
> Use your server logs. That's hardly useful though. Logs are littered with bot traffic, and several users or sessions can be hiding behind a single IP address. Also, you've absolutely no means to track segments of traffic. Self-hosted javascript is an only vaguely better option. You then need to worry about the infrastructure needed to write the data in a reasonably scalable way as you get larger, and processing the data in a useful manner isn't necessarily something an average Joe can do.
- bigbugbag 12y ago
  If you need help to deal with your server logs, hire a professional. By the time you got large enough to have to worry about scaling an infrastructure to deal with your server logs you should either have grown out of the average joe category or have enough revenue to hire a sysadmin.
  - zwetan 12y ago
    The whole point of using a solution like google analytics which is free (to a certain extend) is to not have to hire a professional. There is no way a single sysadmin (how good he think he is) could write the code required for the analytics of a high volume web site (eg. ranked in the top 1000). Also, without analytics right from the start, I can guarantee you, your web site will never grow, at least certainly not to a high volume web site. And here the thing that do happen when your web site have a high volume (you know, in real life and not on a fantasy island), even if you reduce your analytics sampling to 10% your web site traffic can still be bigger than the maximum allowed "for free". So you decide "let's write our own solution" and you assign it to a team of about 5 devs and it take them a good 6 months to finally be able to track data, and then your pointy hairy boss realise he has no nice visual way to read this data (because he want basically the same thing as google analytics). so tell me again why I/we should not use ga again ?
Karunamon 12y ago
As mentioned upthread, even a self hosted solution like piwik is blocked by default. So great to see what we're sacrificing upon the dubious privacy altar...
- nfoz 12y ago
  Server-side log-analysis solutions are not possible to block. I assume that piwik is running client-side javascript? Then it's in the interest of the client to block it; it's not a server-side solution anymore. Of course with self-hosted js, that's a cat-and-mouse game that the clients can't win anyway, but in the short-term the mouse has won.

by nfoz 12y ago

ddebernardy 12y ago

> Use your server logs. That's hardly useful though. Logs are littered with bot traffic, and several users or sessions can be hiding behind a single IP address. Also, you've absolutely no means to track segments of traffic. Self-hosted javascript is an only vaguely better option. You then need to worry about the infrastructure needed to write the data in a reasonably scalable way as you get larger, and processing the data in a useful manner isn't necessarily something an average Joe can do.

bigbugbag 12y ago
If you need help to deal with your server logs, hire a professional. By the time you got large enough to have to worry about scaling an infrastructure to deal with your server logs you should either have grown out of the average joe category or have enough revenue to hire a sysadmin.
- zwetan 12y ago
  The whole point of using a solution like google analytics which is free (to a certain extend) is to not have to hire a professional. There is no way a single sysadmin (how good he think he is) could write the code required for the analytics of a high volume web site (eg. ranked in the top 1000). Also, without analytics right from the start, I can guarantee you, your web site will never grow, at least certainly not to a high volume web site. And here the thing that do happen when your web site have a high volume (you know, in real life and not on a fantasy island), even if you reduce your analytics sampling to 10% your web site traffic can still be bigger than the maximum allowed "for free". So you decide "let's write our own solution" and you assign it to a team of about 5 devs and it take them a good 6 months to finally be able to track data, and then your pointy hairy boss realise he has no nice visual way to read this data (because he want basically the same thing as google analytics). so tell me again why I/we should not use ga again ?

Karunamon 12y ago

As mentioned upthread, even a self hosted solution like piwik is blocked by default. So great to see what we're sacrificing upon the dubious privacy altar...

nfoz 12y ago
Server-side log-analysis solutions are not possible to block. I assume that piwik is running client-side javascript? Then it's in the interest of the client to block it; it's not a server-side solution anymore. Of course with self-hosted js, that's a cat-and-mouse game that the clients can't win anyway, but in the short-term the mouse has won.