Recipes
What Self-Hosted Analytics Really Costs (Full TCO)
The real cost of self-hosted analytics: VPS, backups, maintenance time, and the break-even vs Plausible and Fathom Cloud.
GoatCounter on a Cheap VPS: Minimal Self-Hosted Analytics
// AUTHOR Rajeev Sharma — tested this setup on a Hetzner CX23 in Helsinki, April 2026. // TESTED ON GoatCounter v2.7.0 · Ubuntu 24.04 LTS · nginx 1.24…
Self-Hosted Server-Side Tracking: SSGTM, Cloudflare Worker, Nginx Proxy Compared
Server-side tracking sounded like a luxury three years ago. Now it’s table stakes: ad blockers eat 30-40% of client-side hits in technical audiences, browser ITP truncates first-party cookies…
PostHog on Hetzner: Self-Host Product Analytics with Docker (€15.99/mo, 45 min)
Step-by-step PostHog self-host on Hetzner CX42 (€16.41/mo) — ClickHouse, Postgres, Redis, Kafka, full product analytics stack. Tested 2026-05-02.
Umami on Vercel + Neon: Free Self-Hosted Analytics in 5 Minutes
Deploy Umami to Vercel Hobby with Neon Postgres (free tier) for €0/mo at indie scale. Tested recipe 2026-05-02.
Matomo on Hetzner: Self-Host with MariaDB & Caddy (€8.49/mo, 30 min)
Step-by-step recipe for Matomo on Hetzner CX32 (€8.21/mo) with MariaDB + nginx + Caddy. GA4 importer included. Tested 2026-05-02.
Plausible CE on Hetzner: 20-Minute Self-Host Setup with Caddy (€5.49/mo)
Step-by-step recipe to deploy Plausible Community Edition on Hetzner Cloud (€4.51/mo CX22) behind Caddy auto-HTTPS. Tested 2026-05-02. Zero cookies, EU-hosted.