LiteStat: Ultra-Lightweight Privacy Analytics for Low-Resource VPS

I ran Matomo on a 1GB RAM VPS for about a year tracking three low-traffic sites and it was fine. The database is what gets hungry over time so you'll want to set the data retention to auto-purge raw logs after a few months. Default is forever which will absolutely wreck a small VPS once the visits table fills up. 30GB storage is plenty if you're not archiving years of raw data and you skip the heatmap/session recording plugins (those write a ton). The CPU spikes during archiving cron jobs but you can schedule that for off-hours and it won't affect anything since your blog is static. Shared hosting is hit or miss because Matomo needs a cron job to process reports and some hosts block that or throttle it to death. If you go the VPS route just keep PHP opcache enabled and bump the memory limit a bit. For 10k monthly views you're nowhere near what the official minimums suggest, those are for like 300k+ monthly with all features turned on.

For the type of analytics you want I'd look into something like Umami instead: https://github.com/umami-software/umami It does require a bit more ram to bootstrap itself once initially starting (2gigs of ram), but afterwards it never really peaks around too much for me for modest traffic amounts (100k to 300k). But you're requirements are so low even Umami itself offers free analytics if you're under 100k visits per month. Might be worth it, there's also another analytics project (basically a hit counter) whose name I can't remember that was written in C and is highly performance. The maintainer of that project allows anyone to use it for free and he shows how cheap it costs him to run (something like $10/month and he has a few hundred users. Really wish I remember the last one because it seems right up your rally. One thing to consider when self hosting in general is that most of the popular projects are not performative at all. Nearly everything requires at least 2 gigs of ram, it does become harder to justify a large VPS box if you're only utilizing a small ram amounts. Personally found Matomo too overkill for my needs, it's quite an advance analytics engine but unless your business is say a massive e-commerce site or media site or anything that requires highly granular analytics and user flows.

For the type of analytics you want I'd look into something like Umami instead: https://github.com/umami-software/umami It does require a bit more ram to bootstrap itself once initially starting (2gigs of ram), but afterwards it never really peaks around too much for me for modest traffic amounts (100k to 300k). But you're requirements are so low even Umami itself offers free analytics if you're under 100k visits per month. Might be worth it, there's also another analytics project (basically a hit counter) whose name I can't remember that was written in C and is highly performance. The maintainer of that project allows anyone to use it for free and he shows how cheap it costs him to run (something like $10/month and he has a few hundred users. Really wish I remember the last one because it seems right up your rally. One thing to consider when self hosting in general is that most of the popular projects are not performative at all. Nearly everything requires at least 2 gigs of ram, it does become harder to justify a large VPS box if you're only utilizing a small ram amounts. Personally found Matomo too overkill for my needs, it's quite an advance analytics engine but unless your business is say a massive e-commerce site or media site or anything that requires highly granular analytics and user flows.