Self-Hosted Privacy-First Analytics
Overview
Google Analytics tracks everything, sells everything, and answers to nobody but Alphabet. For a personal blog that’s overkill — but I still wanted analytics. The answer was Plausible: lightweight, privacy-friendly, and self-hostable.
Running it in Podman containers behind Cloudflare tunnels means the analytics data stays on my infrastructure. No third party touches it. No cookie banners needed. Just simple, accurate stats.
Setup
- Platform: Plausible Analytics (self-hosted)
- Containerization: Podman (rootless containers)
- Networking: Cloudflare Tunnels (no open ports)
- Domain: analytics.derekarmstrong.dev
Why Self-Hosted Analytics
- No data leaks: Your traffic data never leaves your infrastructure
- No cookie banners: Plausible doesn’t use cookies, no GDPR compliance theater needed
- Full control: Custom domains, custom retention, no rate limits
- Cost: Free software, runs on existing infrastructure
Philosophy
This is the same principle that drives the rest of the homelab: if you can run it yourself, you own the data. Third-party analytics services are convenient until they’re not — until they change their privacy policy, get breached, or decide your data is worth more to them than your readers’ trust.
Running your own analytics stack costs maybe 200MB of RAM and five minutes of setup. The peace of mind is worth more.
