One thing I was not happy about was Google Analytics. To keep my uptime I want to know the number of page loads and system load in order to optimize and scale. I know, I should probably be using a CDN to mitigate some of these issues, but I don’t feel I’m there just yet. Google Analytics is one of those services that is not known to be privacy friendly, and if you are here, I respect you and your time. I don’t include ads and I try to keep the tracking as limited as possible disabling social crap, etc. For my purposes, I don’t need Google analytics. A web server logs all of the information I need for scaling purposes. All I needed was to access those logs (which I already had access to) and store the data in a database, create a dashboard, and kiss Google Analytics goodbye.

I know, I could’ve used AWS or Google Cloud to do this; but the cost over time would have been prohibitive. Self-hosting seems like the right answer at the moment.

The game plan: