Hello y'all! I have my personal (static) website / blog running on netlify out on the public internet. Netlify, in case you're not familiar, is not a traditional web host, so I can't add databases or anything else like that on the server itself. Right now, that site has zero analytics / visitor tracking and I've decided I want to fix that. I want to know how many people visited my site and which pages they looked at. I am NOT looking to monetize anything though, to be clear.
I want to self-host that analytics service at home, on my home server, but I need two things, please:
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Recommendations for which app to use. I've checked out Umami and Plausible and they both look good for my meager purposes. But please - let me know which app makes sense for a personal web site with low-ish traffic. Is there something simpler I could do?
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Help getting the reverse proxy set up so my public web site can send analytics data into my home server. I would prefer this to be entirely under my control, so no CloudFlare or Tailscale, for instance. Is Caddy an option? I get really confused really quickly about this level of networking, to be clear, so maybe I just need a really plain-English guide to handling this sort of thing?
Thanks for any / all ideas! Y'all so totally rock!
ETA: A little more info about Netlify and why I can't install or use tools other traditional web hosts might offer.
** SECOND EDIT**: Thanks to @[email protected] for the goatcounter suggestion, I am trying that out now for the analytics side of this. Getting it set up was easy and free, using their server. (I know, I know...) If I still like the app after the next couple of weeks, I will move it in-house and self-host. That gives me a couple of weeks to figure out my second issue above, how to have my public web site make requests to my self-hosted, behind the firewall/NAT service. Yay, more learning!
Sure but I can't have a HTML or JS file write to any file on my web server directly, so I can't store a number anywhere in Netlify to increment a counter.