View website traffic using a free service

Question

I have a academic website whose host belongs to my university. My domain is something like this: http://myuniversity.edu/~myusername/. I want to view the website traffic using a free service. Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn't work in my country. I was wondering if there is any such free powerful service. I googled and found some alternatives, but I don't know whether they are a good one or not. Besides, if I use some services like alexa, it just shows me the traffic of http://myuniversity.edu/, but I want this: http://myuniversity.edu/~myusername/. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

Answer 1

If you are even mildly flexible on price, you may wish to look at Matomo, formerly Piwik . It is a 100% open-source web analytics platform. While it does require a server to run some basic software, the tracking is done with a small snippet of Javascript (so the monitored pages do not necessarily have to run on the same server as Matomo).

I want to view the website traffic using a free service.

It may be possible to run Matomo for free but (as a small hassle-saver) you may want to look at their own analytics service, which has (arguably) reasonable monthly rates currently.

That said, being open-source, you can set up your own service for as little as possible. The source code is free, based on common web technologies (PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS) and the basic setup is relatively easy. As small caveats, it does require a MySQL database and PHP with PDO extensions enabled for MySQL.

Regarding any costs involved with this second option, they likely rely entirely how you approach it :

• University Servers - If there is an opportunity to self-host on your university servers, this might be a good avenue to explore.

• Free/Low-cost Hosting - There certainly some free or low-cost hosts (a few dollars a month) that provide PHP and MySQL, but since PHP PDO support is technically optional, hosts may not have it enabled. Note that you can check PHP PDO and PDO_MYSQL support (both required) with <?php phpinfo() ?>. Simply place this in a .php document by itself, upload it to the server and navigate to the page it generates to see if these items are listed alphabetically.

• Web App Hosts - Web App services such as RedHat OpenShift (which has a free tier) may be another option to consider.

• Self-hosting - For simple analytics, you may be able to run a minimal setup yourself (such as a Raspberry Pi or another older computer). This is obviously more involved as it requires running a small web server, but it's not impossible. PHP and MySQL are both free and have solid support on Windows and Linux. Likewise, well-known web servers Apache and Nginx are both free and have cross-platform versions as well. For your analytics domain, free Dynamic DNS subdomains are available from a number of providers or you can use a DotTK if you want a "real" domain at no cost (though a real domain will require a free DNS service).