Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/822568/61d29096a4012e06/ <comment><USER3> I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1].

Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off.

And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting personal info. Profiling visitors is no longer possible, but you still get valuable data on visits.

Note that if you want to self-host Matomo, you don't need more than a VPS with 1 GB of RAM (even less but let's assume significant traffic) so it's cheap to self host too.

And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.

And if you write that blog with a purpose (e.g. promoting yourself or your projects) then you need to get a sense of how well your articles are received. You can't do marketing without a feedback loop.

[1] [https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)

[2] [https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157/](https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157/)

[3] [https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/](https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/)

<comment><USER4> I self-hosted Matomo for a year and a half (and took over the AUR package for it and improved it in the process). It was no trouble to run, but I ended up uninstalling it late last year, for a few reasons: its interface is painfully slow (and that's nothing to do with my 1GB/1 vCPU VPS—I've interacted with a decent-sized instance at innocraft.cloud and it was similar), and I seldom looked at it, and I couldn't think of any way in which anything I found in the analytics would change my behaviour, and server-side analytics are good enough (better on some ways, worse in others), and I value speed. So all up, I figured: why am I slowing all my users down with this 50KB of JavaScript (of which I frankly need less than 1KB), and why am I keeping this software going?

So now I pull out GoAccess (which reads the server logs) from time to time. I find that my Atom feed is the vast majority of _traffic_ to my site, which Matomo couldn't tell me. I should implement pagination on the feed and see if that helps. (Or limit the number of items in the feed, but conceptually I rather like everything being accessible from the feed. Wonder how many feed readers support pagination?)

<comment><USER3> My websites are behind Cloudflare. If not Cloudflare then I'd use another CDN. Therefore I don't have logs.

Also I disagree about the slowness.

The script is loaded asynchrously, it does not block the page and I measure my loading times, which are really good actually. Just did a measurement and my front-page loads in 271 ms and this includes all network requests, including Matomo.

I don't think this is a real concern, but rather a premature optimization. If GoAccess works for you, great, but that's not something I can use due to CDN.

<comment><USER5> > Just did a measurement and my front-page loads in 271 ms and this includes > all network requests

Is your audience just the people in your locality, or the entire world?

<comment><USER3> The test wasn't local.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I turned off Google Analytics, because I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data, just vanity metrics, and many of them of dubious quality.

I run a SaaS and what matters for me is paid subscriptions. "Visits" (even if by humans, which is hard to tell) really do not matter much. Yes, I do want to increase conversion rates, and run bandit experiments, but I'm better off doing that myself.

What also matters are search terms, but Google's search console (or tools, or whatever it's called this week) provides that.

Turning off Google Analytics was hard to do psychologically — the Fear Of Missing Out is strong. But it turns out I'm not missing out on anything, except some dubious vanity data. And I'm making the web a better place in the process.

<comment><USER7> > I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data

The actionable part never occurred to me, but makes so much sense. What action could anyone really take, based on the data presented by Google Analytics? On top of my head I can actually think of anything you could easily get from server logs.

<comment><USER8> I find time spent on page is a great way to measure performance of redesigns on page. There are numerous actionable points.

<comment><USER6> It might be, assuming two things:

1) That you actually care about this metric. I don't, I do not get paid by the number of minutes spent on pages, I get paid by the number of signed-up subscribers who use my software to make their workflow easier. I can (and prefer to) use bandit testing to measure the performance of redesigns.

2) that it can be reliably measured, which I don't think it can.

<comment><USER8> We are a SaaS company also, and time spent reading manual/tutorial pages is important to us.

With regards to point two, being reliably measured sounds to me like perfection is the enemy of adequate. Perhaps in low volumes you can't measure certain stats like this reliabily but in large volumes I think it's useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I run a reasonably large website and about two years ago it dawned on me that I _never checked Google Analytics._ It was completely useless. It wasn't telling me anything useful. I also knew that it was marginally user hostile (or at least perceived as such) and affecting page performance, even if only slightly.

Removing it felt momentous and insane. But in November 2018 I finally plucked up the courage and removed it. The crazy thing is, until this article appeared on the top of Hacker News reminded me, I had completely forgotten that I had removed it. Far from the world ending, it turned out to be the most inconsequential thing imaginable.

(I remember pouring over web server logs in Analog and AWStats 15+ years ago. Now I honestly can't remember why. I think it was some combination of vanity... and because everyone else was doing it. I suspect for most web developers GA was just the natural evolution of that muscle memory.)

<comment><USER10> GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.

<comment><USER9> I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are probably great for corporate/enterprise stuff.

I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries.

And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of them are temporally incongruous—I think that's how you'd describe it—in that they look at what happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users, while they were new/irregular users, but which subsequently became regular users.)

<comment><USER10> Well that's a different story then. It sounds like you measure things your own way, so I agree that analytics are pointless in your edge case.

For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what doesn't. That's why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been happily using Fathom Analytics: [https://usefathom.com](https://usefathom.com) and I have zero complaints.

No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your own domain. They even do site monitoring now!

<comment><USER12> From the site:

> Our on-demand, auto-scaling servers will never slow your site down. Our > tracker file is served via our super-fast CDN, with endpoints located around > the world to ensure fast page loads.

This suggests that this solution is not self hosted. Is there a solution like this which is really self hosted? This service is one small change away from actually tracking.

Edit: Piwik/Matomo[1] appears to be the most mature one. [1]: [https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)

<comment><USER13> Fathom is open source [https://github.com/usefathom/fathom](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom)

<comment><USER14> That's the old project- they have decided not to open source the new one.

The open source project is barely maintained at this point- they update the readme and get the occasionally pull request, but it's not really being developed.

I unfortunately switched to Fathom back when they were telling people they were committed to open source, so now I'm looking to migrate off to something a bit more trustworthy.

<comment><USER10> You've been saying this since last year. If I can help you migrate off of Fathom Lite to something else, please let me know.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I've been busy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently had a discussion about the interface with the Goatcounter developer [1]. Also put in a feature request with Posthog [2]. Hadn't heard of Plausible, maybe that's the one for me!

[1]: [https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/issues/302](https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/issues/302)

[2]: [https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/1020](https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/1020)

<comment><USER16> > Hadn't heard of Plausible, maybe that's the one for me!

Plausible is pretty good, found it useful to monitor traffic and usage for small projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for mentioning Simple Analytics [1]. We are at this point indeed only cloud based. We believe we need to make a business case/profit first before putting a lot of extra work in a open source version and maybe failing with the business. It's a dream to make it open source, but not at this time.

We are very firm on our values. We will never sell your data. We have many ways to get your raw data out of our system (API, download links, ...).

Our collection script [2] is open source and today we are also adding source maps to our public scripts. Open source does not guarantee that a business runs that same software as their cloud based option. We are looking into services that can validate what we collect on our servers. We never collect any IPs of personal data [3].

Great to see more products that care about privacy, I hope they will really care and commit to their values for a long time.

[1] [https://simpleanalytics.com](https://simpleanalytics.com)

[2] [https://github.com/simpleanalytics/scripts](https://github.com/simpleanalytics/scripts)

[3] [https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we- collect](https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-collect)

</comment><comment><USER18> What kind of server-side analytics are people using today, for personal blogs and things? Projects like GoAccess which eat an nginx log file and output some analytics seem like a nice middle ground for those of us who want some feedback on how people are using a website, without needing all the bells and whistles of something more like Google Analytics (not to mention the fact that it doesn't need any Javascript loaded or anything). Personally I've found GoAccess pretty good, but the interface a little difficult to use and understand, so I'm looking for projects like it.

<comment><USER19> Server side was how it was always done back in the early days of the web, and analog[0] was state of the art.

Around 1999/2000 there was a rise of ISPs needing to install reverse proxy caches because the growth of consumer access meant they were getting seriously contended on upstream access. I was working at the time at a UK 0845 white label ISP called Telinco (was behind Connect Free, Totalise, Current Bun and other 0845 ISPs), and to my knowledge we were the first in the UK to install a Netapps cache. It was the moment we realised (by checking the logs to see if it was working), just how much porn our customers were accessing.

Those caches blow server side analytics to pieces, because frequently you wouldn't even know the user had hit the page. What server side analytics was useful for is what we'd now call Observability: they gave reasonable Latency, Error Rate and Throughput metrics, which combined with some other system logs might also give you a sense of Saturation.

As such, they were not too useful for marketing. Google Analytics was the first product that allowed high fidelity analytics even if reverse proxy caches (and even browser caches), were all over the place.

And here we are. In a World where we are tightly surveilled by corporate entities in order to try and get us to click on things. Bit sad really.

I'd encourage people to think about what they need these analytics for.

If it's marketing, you might just as well using GA: it's the best product out there. We just need to lobby for better regulation (at least GDPR and cookie setting popovers give us choices on that regard now).

If you're stroking your ego, consider whether such an invasive technology is worth the price, and if you need those numbers.

If you're making sure your infrastructure can handle the traffic, use server side analytics alone. Parse your logs using the huge number of tools out there able to do that in near-realtime, and leave your users' browsers free of tracking cookies and javascript.

[0] [https://www.web42.com/analog/](https://www.web42.com/analog/)

<comment><USER20> Caches are irrelevant now that the world has moved to HTTPS.

<comment><USER21> There are no public caches with HTTPS, but there are still private browser and CDN caches to contend with.

To ensure your origin server is hit on subsequent HTTPS requests, you would still need to configure response headers for cache validation [1] to be

      Cache-Control: no-cache

instead of

      Cache-Control: private

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control)

<comment><USER20> Yes, but those are caches that you control, so when it comes to analytics you would get the logs off them too in order to get accurate metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> TIL about European Union Public License:

[https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction- eup...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction-eupl-licence)

OSI-certified, copyleft, non-viral, GPL-compatible, SaaS-aware, multilingual

<comment><USER23> how can it be both copyleft and non viral? isn't vitality a definitive feature of copy left?

<comment><USER24> > it has no "viral effect" in case of linking

<comment><USER25> Neither does the GPL or any other licence under European laws.

<comment><USER26> That's surprising, considering the virality is part of the license text, not the law; does the law prohibit that clause?

<comment><USER25> Here's a good explanation: [https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why- viral-l...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral- licensing-ghost)

The short answer is that there are certain protections that ensure interoperability, and that linking to software does not make it a derivative work.

<comment><USER27> That's an interesting analysis.

That directive is usually understood to be about reverse engineering in order to build compatible software: "to obtain the necessary information to achieve the interoperability of an independently created program with other programs" being a key bit.

It's not immediately clear to me - a programmer but not a lawyer - that this has any bearing on whether linking creates a derivative work.

Have any other experts, or courts, weighed in on whether this analysis is sound?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to not use self- hosted analytics.

The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is exactly a GA-like setup that can track people as they go from one website to another. That is, the real value of an analytics service is derived directly from its ability to invade people privacy, at scale.

Granted, migrating to another service is usually simpler, but it offers NO insights into the traffic that you can't get from parsing server logs and in- page pingbacks. You do however get a 3rd party dependency and a subscription fee.

<comment><USER29> Server logs only tell you about things that happen on your server. If you are using JavaScript it's likely there are plenty of events that might be valuable to you that never leave a trace in your logs.

For example, if you validate forms with JS you might want to track form submissions and validation errors.

<comment><USER28> _... and in-page pingbacks_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I use GoAccess. It's an offline access.log analytics engine. One feature it has is to generate static site from its db. I have an hourly cron script that picks up the last hours logs and generates a static site. You can see it in action at [https://www.clusin.com/analytics/](https://www.clusin.com/analytics/)

1 - [https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess](https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess)

<comment><USER31> I've tried GoAccess in the past, but I remember the documentation not being very thorough on certain topics like the databse, websocket connection, or log syntax. So it was a bit of a pain to set up.

It also had some weird quirks like generating duplicate entries or randomly failing to parse some log lines (you seem to have quite a few of those "failed requests" yourelf by the way).

There also doesn't seem to be a good way to display statistics for multiple virtual hosts. Even if you change your log format to include the host, you just get an additional table in the dashboard, but still can't look at the other metrics for each host separately. You'd have to run multiple GoAccess instances to achieve that.

<comment><USER30> Yeah I definitely had to open some issues to understand how it works. I have multiple virtual servers as well and wasn't able to get it to break out links by virtual server.

I figured it's fine for my needs since I literally have nothing on my domains. I could see it being frustrating for power users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tangential but...

"Analytics" is rarely useful or unuseful because of the tool. These tools need to be treated as data collection, not reporting.

If your goal is to inform certain decisions, track success or identify problems... a spreadsheet (or napkin) is usually where that happens.

Say you do analysis systematically, make a list of questions and use your tools to answer them... usually you find that the tool itself doesn't matter much, and GA doesn't answer most of your questions out-of-the-box anyway.

Say you want a "funnel." That usually consists of a handful of data points. GA usually doesn't have them by default, without tinkering configuration, etc. Decide what they are beforehand. Understand them. Use GA (or whatever) to get the data.

Finding the tool for the job is much easier once you know what the job _is_. GA is extremely noisy, bombarding users with half-accurate, half-understood reports.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been pretty happy with Matomo (formerly Piwik), especially their non- cookie mode. But the interface is ugly, confusing, and makes finding information much more difficult than Google Analytics does.

Edit: One major thing I am unhappy with in Matomo is event tracking. GA makes it much easier (in my experience) to track conversions and events, and presents the data in a better way.

<comment><USER34> I found the Matomo interface to be a breath of fresh air compared to Google Analytics! As a non-power user, GA was too heavy and enterprise-like. Matomo is much cleaner, simpler, and more efficient for me to work with.

<comment><USER33> I'm surprised to hear that! Are you using a different theme?

<comment><USER34> I don't think so - just the default. The light version of [https://themes.matomo.org/DarkTheme#preview](https://themes.matomo.org/DarkTheme#preview).

<comment><USER33> Thanks – I'll give it a try

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Off topic, but I used to run a website that had Google Analytics. This site and domain are now 100% down and have been for over a year.

I _still_ get monthly emails from Google about the analytics for this website. Apparently it's getting 200-300 visitors per month still. I have replied back to Google vie email about this several times but never heard any reply. I wonder what site they are tracking?

<comment><USER36> It is quite possible to take a GA tracking code for one site and put it on another site. This has happened to me quite a lot where people have lifted content or copied code from my site. You can see the hostnames in GA (you have to dig for it), which could explain this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I use Ackee, also a simple and open source alternative [https://ackee.electerious.com/](https://ackee.electerious.com/)

<comment><USER38> Another alternative not listed in the article: [https://www.offen.dev/](https://www.offen.dev/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've recently whipped up my own self-hosted analytics solution [0] based on SQLite, Bash and Metabase. It's all self hosted, easy to install and very flexible with regards to the queries you can write and display. Metabase comes with a lot of cool features for display, live reload and other cool stuff. :)

[0]: [https://funnybretzel.com/self-hosted-analytics-using- sqlite-...](https://funnybretzel.com/self-hosted-analytics-using-sqlite-and- metabase/)

<comment><USER40> Thanks for the tutorial. Looks interesting.

I'm a fan of GoAccess. Unfortunately the queries are pre-made and there are nearly no options whatsoever. You can't (yet) filter by date for example.

One thing I realized is, that on small sites, like my blog, an overwhelming amount of traffic comes from search engines or bots which are looking for vulnerabilities. Filtering them out takes a lot of time in any self-hosted or self-made solution.

<comment><USER41> I use GoAccess too. If I want to filter by date (for example) I just run the log file through sed before feeding it to GoAccess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm honestly curious, are all the analytics tools, which rely on making third party queries, still efficient with extensive use of adblocking these days?

If not, then logs of webservers are the only 100% reliable place (if available of course), so old-style tools like awstats, Webalizer, etc [1] should have a rise in popularity again.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software)

<comment><USER10> Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you'll see how unreliable they really are.

For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom's custom domain feature has done really well for the majority: [https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed- code](https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code)

<comment><USER43> Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to tracking server anyway.

Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking server) solutions are resilient to adblocking

<comment><USER42> Interesting, then as a workaround trackers may create an image with pseudo- random src pointing to pageXXXwebsiteYYYclientZZZ.ad.yoursite.com (yoursite.com is the site which serves the actual content), while asking the owner to point NS record for ad.yoursite.com to IP of their DNS server. So HTTP/S request or DNS request can reach them anyway. Obviously DNS caching will prevent them from knowing how many times this particular page was accessed by this particular client, but at least they will know that it was accessed at least once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I really hope an analytic genius can come up with a technique (like differential privacy, but I'm no expert here) that would give advertisers what they want (unique visitor counts, and very few other metrics) to place ads on sites, yet doesn't give away too much privacy, nor leads to enslavement under a single central entity. I guess if something like that doesn't come along, then only old school content-based ads (site sponsoring) without any tracking can be considered ethical (or no-ads of course). The argument against content- based ads was always that it doesn't suffice to finance even web hosting let alone content production. But with ad prices going to the bottom, I wonder if the figures still add up in favour of targetted ads today.

<comment><USER45> Apple/Webkit already has a proposal along those lines.

[https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click- att...](https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution- for-the-web/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Snowplow is also an option. It's an open-source data collection solution that, unlike GA, gives you full ownership of your event-level data and the freedom to define your own data structures. Not exactly what you'd call 'lightweight' but quite a few Snowplow users/customers have come from GA for the level of flexibility and control they can have over their data sets.

(Full disclosure: I work for Snowplow Analytics)

\- [https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow)

\- [https://snowplowanalytics.com/](https://snowplowanalytics.com/)

<comment><USER47> I've setup the Snowplow collector and tracker on some of my sites because that part is _very_ straightforward (and the tutorial on the wiki is great), but I've never gotten past those steps to analyse the data collected.

Is there a highly-opinionated tutorial that shows how one can get some vanity metrics out from Snowplow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still can't see any solid reasons why a site owner would not use GA.

Other products:

\- Objectively lack features

\- Potentially incur extra costs in money/time

\- May be a small barrier in m&a

\- May carry additional risks/attack vectors if self hosted

Trying to ween off big tech is commendable, but likely detrimental to a business.

Relatively high risk, low reward.

I'm happy to have my mind changed. I can see a case for user hostility, but most sites I imagine don't have an audience sensitive to this at the moment anyway.

From an idealogical standpoint, other cloud stat tracking services would only function if not many people used them. And I would also imagine feature creep would be inevitable and lead them to becoming an inferior version of GA.

<comment><USER48> GDPR compliance.

GDPR is the European privacy law. It protects European citizens so it applies not only to European companies but any company that does business in Europe (having offices or advertising/selling there).

Google does not give much assurance regarding their GDPR compliance... their text on that subject is mostly CYA and then they make it your responsibility to decide how to use it in compliance (if at all possible).

The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors through cookies as long as all private information (even IP) is anonymized... OR you can go do a more traditional tracking with their explicit agreement. This last use case is completely useless in terms of visitor statistics, but analytics companies sometimes dare suggest it (as in "this is the way to do things right... so our product is compliant and it's not our responsibility if you break the law").

That aside, I run international non-profit sites and GA is a bad look... and with good reason: Using social network sharing buttons, GA, CDNs, etc. gives too much power to track people to a few companies.

<comment><USER44> > _GA is a bad look_

Totally agree, but are there "acceptable" CDNs, like unpkg? What about Google Fonts?

> _The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors through cookies as long > as all private information (even IP) is anonymized._

If it's not too much to ask, could you expand on that a bit, or share a link? I guess you mean it's ok to send a browser fingerprint for unique visitor stats without having to ask for permission, but I'm not aware of any legal debate let alone court decision with respect to that.

Edit: obviously I can't read ("through cookies"), but cookies for unique visitor counts aren't "functional" are they, so my interpretation is that those cookies need consent; I'd love to hear otherwise though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Countly [1] is another open source alternative to Google Analytics - <USER2> you try it on Digital Ocean [2] or deploy on your own [3].

It is self hosted, has support for desktop apps, mobile apps and web apps at the same time.

[1] [https://count.ly](https://count.ly)

[2] [https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly- analytics](https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics)

[3] [https://github.com/countly/countly- server](https://github.com/countly/countly-server)

<comment><USER50> Interesting. Thanks. But I am not so sure about disabling SELinux:

> Disable SELinux on Red Hat or CentOS if it has been enabled. Countly may not > work on a server where SELinux is enabled. In order to disable SELinux, run > "setenforce 0".

[https://support.count.ly/hc/en- us/articles/360036862332-Inst...](https://support.count.ly/hc/en- us/articles/360036862332-Installing-Countly-server#disable-selinux)

<comment><USER51> Unfortunately common on projects like these. Instead of guiding admins on how to properly configure SELinux it's easiest to just throw your hands up and say "disable it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> If your app is already built with Rails, adding [https://github.com/ankane/ahoy](https://github.com/ankane/ahoy) is pretty simple. Combine with [https://github.com/ankane/blazer](https://github.com/ankane/blazer) and you can build a reasonable set of reports as well.

It's pretty simple to extend too: I've added basic client-side (JavaScript) error reporting on top of it, and I'm thinking about using it for Content Security Policy reporting too.

<comment><USER53> Yeah, ahoy is pretty awesome! In fact everything by ankane is inkanely great - I have no idea how he manages to be so productive....

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is nice to see Plausible gaining traction. Here is an blog post [1] about how they were asked for using it on site with tens or hundreds of million page view.

I am wondering if HN is interested in hosting analytics like plausible that is open for us to see. Sometimes I do wonder how many page view do HN get per day, where are we all from etc. For example the plausible demo site. 35% are using macOS. But only 15% uses Safari.

[1] [https://plausible.io/blog/april-2020-recap](https://plausible.io/blog/april-2020-recap)

</comment><comment><USER55> It's great to see more alternatives to GA, and to see those alternatives getting attention.

For those interested, one other FOSS analytics tool is Shynet [0]. Modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS. It also looks pretty slick. Disclosure: I'm a maintainer.

[0] [https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet](https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet)

</comment><comment><USER56> I was recently looking for a good tool that supports both web site analytics and app analytics (custom events, typically pushed by SPAs). I looked at GA, Amplitude and finally Matomo (which I ended up with). GA and Amplitude either did not offer or made it hard to work down to the micro level, essentially tracking known individual users down to the singular event level. Matomo makes this easy, although it certainly looks a bit dated compared to the competition. And the free parts are somewhat limited (you need to buy stuff or hosting).

I would have though that there would be several decent packages offering www + app analytics by now, but as I wrote, options were quite limited. Some of the options mentioned in the subject here looks like good options for just website analytics, but I'm not seeing much as far as "app analytics" (custom events) goes.

<comment><USER10> Less companies are focusing on user level tracking, as it's an invasion of privacy and compliance doesn't allow it

<comment><USER57> Less companies are focusing on user level tracking because one single user is not a meaningful statistical group.

Companies focusing on user level tracking today provide a different set of tools one might be used to and that can of course be compliant, see [https://www.hotjar.com/](https://www.hotjar.com/).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> We launched [https://everytwoyears.org](https://everytwoyears.org) today. It was my first project where I felt analytics was necessary, but also a moral quandary. For personal reasons, I'm very against PII big data. For project reasons, the project is literally about stopping mass surveillance so shipping a tool like Google Analytics was firmly off the table.

I went with [https://app.usefathom.com](https://app.usefathom.com) which tracks _aggregate anonymized_ data.

They have the option to self host, but I'm sending them money to support the project. With today's launch, I'm really happy with the product. Will continue using it.

<comment><USER10> We really appreciate people like you, thank you. And on a personal level, I respect your "BREAKING THROUGH TWO PARTY POLITICS" tagline.

<comment><USER58> <3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I can also add mine, even though more complex, it's still lightweight: [https://usertrack.net](https://usertrack.net)

I tried bringing together the most useful analytics features (user segments, heatmaps, session recordings, tags/events) in a self-hosted platform with simple UI. A/B testing feature is also coming soon. I built the platform with the optimal use-case being improving conversion rates on landing pages.

My goal now is to prove and teach (even to non-technical users) that self- hosting is easy nowadays when you can create a VPS running your desired software in just a few clicks.

I would love to hear some criticism or why you wouldn't want to try something like this.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd like to ditch google analytics for a new small side project I'm building. I live in a small country in Europe and for me the most important feature of these alternatives is the cookieless tracking and the lightweight scripts. However, the pricing is too steep for a project that won't gain more than thousands users.

Fathom analytics and simple analytics cost ~100$/year.

Plausible costs ~50$

I really liked and almost settled with plausible but I just saw goatcounter right now. It's free for personal / open source projects. That's so nice for small projects like many people here are building.

<comment><USER61> Fathom and Plausible are both open source:

[https://github.com/usefathom/fathom](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom) [https://github.com/plausible/analytics](https://github.com/plausible/analytics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I have been using GA for my side projects but have been unhappy with the Google's direction on privacy, so started researching others. There are just _so_ many: I think a lot of developers (including myself) think it is easy to do & start rolling their own & then try to productize it.

Here is my research: [https://til.marcuse.info/webmaster/alt- analytics.html](https://til.marcuse.info/webmaster/alt-analytics.html)

I ended up going with GoatCounter.

</comment><comment><USER63> Maybe stop spying on people?

EU be like you have to put up this banner to tell them you are spying... it super annoying and everyone hates it... and you be like "sure, I love me some spying".

<comment><USER64> Counting how many people come in to your store and how many of them actually but something is not "spying".

<comment><USER63> You also don't need client side spyware to track this information.

<comment><USER64> You don't _need_ anything, but it's a useful way to do it without any significant drawbacks. In many cases, it's more or less the only option.

<comment><USER63> It is a significant drawback! It is literally not the only option to the situation you described.

Spying is the only solution for spying, yes. Spying is the only solution to over-eager people wanting mostly useless metrics.

It's not much different than me checking my Twitter "likes" constantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Has anyone used any of these with a proxy to avoid ad blocker blocking? What I mean is, I installed matomo and then saw my ad blocker blocked it. Is there a way to make any of these work by proxying through the same domain as the site, so those analytics requests look just like all other ajax requests?

I was surprised matomo wasn't listed here. Does anyone know if that was intentional? Seems like it fits the criteria of the post and the goals of open source.

<comment><USER64> > I was surprised matomo wasn't listed here. Does anyone know if that was > intentional? Seems like it fits the criteria of the post and the goals of > open source.

Yes, this was intentional as this article was focused on "light-weight" analytics. I think they'll do an article about Matomo at some point in the future as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Another shameless plug, if you are just using it for finding out where visitors are coming from and page hits, I wrote [https://geo- yak.com](https://geo-yak.com) for that. Doubles as an ip geolocation API.

I'm putting the finishing touches on a `tag=XXX` parameter that allows you to record a tag (like a pageid), and then filter the maps by it (not publicly documented yet, but will be in the next couple weeks).

</comment><comment><USER67> I switched to GoatCounter for my personal blog and it's more than capable. All I want is pageviews with timestamps per page and referrer info.

</comment><comment><USER68> A lot of people may not care about this, but Google Analytics (and another 3rd party, hosted analytics platforms) are very important when trying to sell your website. Basically, it allows the buyer to access reliable historical data about your website which in turn makes it easier to arrive at a valuation.

</comment><comment><USER69> You can always roll your own basic analytics, eg [https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own- analytics](https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics)

Doing so is extremely helpful to understanding what events and data you actually need for your use case.

</comment><comment><USER70> Here's the most lightweight alternative to Google Analytics:

Don't use analytics. You really don't need it. No. You really don't. No, No. I promise you. Just stop.

All tracking is evil. All ads (except those inside a store for a product inside the same store) are evil.

</comment><comment><USER71> Didn't know about GoatCounter. I think its the only free hosted alternative that I saw.

Having a small static blog hosted on GithubPages, GA was the only option for me. (Not going to pay for analytics while my blog has like, 10 visits a week)

<comment><USER72> I just installed goatcounter on my githubPages Jekyll page. 2 minutes of work, works great.

<comment><USER73> Similar experience. I switched my blog off of GA to Goat. I don't think I'll switch back. I prefer how simple Goat is.

For work though, we use GA and I can't really imagine switching. We actually use the event stuff, so it would be hard to switch away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Google Analytics has a "bot filtering" option that works pretty well (even though it's not perfect). Do the alternatives also have similar features? There is a lot of automated traffic on the internet.

<comment><USER75> Matomo has the same, works pretty well. Via plugin they can also track bots to show that separately but they're filtered by default.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure if it's actually filtered - I think they're just tracked and classified. At least that's what I'm seeing in my instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Can I ask why any private website even needs analytics? I just don't see the point. Is it just vanity, or making sure anyone actually reads the articles/content, or trying to adapt to audience preferences/search queries/...?

I get the point for any commercial venture but for most sides I simply don't see the added value. If you want to know whether people like your work add a comment section or a newsletter signup - why do you need to spy on your users with intrusive tools, send their data around the globe to kraken like google, just to have a few statistics?

<comment><USER59> What do you mean by private?

I assume many people have sites for their small businesses. Imagine you have a restaurant, you want to be able to know how many people reach your site, how they reach it, why they don't contact you (do they leave after seeing the menu? or the opening times? or the location? or photos?), are your contact forms properly working, is your website loading fast enough, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Related submissions:

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21890027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21890027)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813168)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411047)

</comment><comment><USER78> If you only need page views, for example for a personal blog, try goaccess ([https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/)).

It uses your server logs for simple analytics.

<comment><USER71> But then you can't use it on Github Pages, right?

<comment><USER79> I actually use GoAccess on my personal site, which runs on GitHub Pages. Obviously you don't get the actual web server logs (only GitHub has those), but I have a few lines of JavaScript that hits a 1x1 image on CloudFront with the page and referrer information, and then I download the CloudFront logs and use those with GoAccess. Read more here: [https://benhoyt.com/writings/replacing-google- analytics/](https://benhoyt.com/writings/replacing-google-analytics/)

<comment><USER71> seems like... way too much work.

Ive changed to Goat Counter, but thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dynamite-ready I often read posts stating a great deal of discouragement for self developed analytic solutions. I've recently developed a home rolled solution for a product I'll hopefully launch soon.

There's no UI for my signals application, but it should give me raw access to all the GA metrics people typically look for (pages, referrers, user agents, etc). Storage could be pain point. Compute might also turn out to be, but if that ever becomes a problem, then I'll probably have much more to think about...

What am I missing here?

<comment><USER10> Opportunity cost. Hacker News has some of the best developers in the world reading it. $100-500 / hourly rates. Why would they spend their time building & maintaining something when they could pay $140 / year for a top tier, privacy-focused analytics product like Fathom, where both founders work full time on it?

Then you have redundancy of data. How are they backing up historical data? Are they running with failovers? How will their analytics do in the event that they get a hug of death from Hacker News or Reddit? There are so many factors to consider.

I don't think we should discourage people from rolling their own if they enjoy it. Heck, I've built things that existed. That's how we get better. I'm just sharing why a lot of developers won't roll their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I have always used AWStats [0] and never thought I needed more information than that.

[0]: [https://www.awstats.org/](https://www.awstats.org/)

<comment><USER81> Same. Plus I have 15 years of continuous browsable data now. I check it all the time and it tells me what I want to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Shameless plug: I wrote and use nemea[0] for all my stuff.

[0]: [https://github.com/Bogdanp/nemea](https://github.com/Bogdanp/nemea)

</comment><comment><USER83> I'm working on an end-to-end encrypted analytics SaaS, to try and solve the "putting your eggs in someone else's basket" problem, while offering something simpler than self-hosting.

I'm collecting feedback and looking to open it for beta in the next couple of weeks, but there's already a preview signup link in the newsletter, where I share my progress on building the platform on a weekly basis.

[https://chiffre.io](https://chiffre.io)

<comment><USER84> Out of interest, if you say you honor DNT, how exactly do you handle browsers that do not allow setting this as a user preference anymore (Firefox, Safari)?

<comment><USER83> Firefox's settings (as of v77) still allow you to set (or unset) DNT, and I honor that. For Safari unfortunately, Apple chose to remove this feature because it could be used for fingerprinting, so there is not much to be done here.

<comment><USER84> Interesting, did Firefox revert their decision towards DNT? I remember being confronted with the behavior of it sending DNT headers no matter what, which must have been something around spring 2019.

<comment><USER83> Possibly, I'm not using the DNT header though, because of the encryption, I need to know about DNT before the analytics data is even sent. I use navigator.doNotTrack, and where it's set I only encrypt and send a minimal visit count event.

<comment><USER84> I tried to do the exact same thing and had to stop considering DNT as it would essentially collect Chrome only back then. Good thing they have reverted this I guess. DNT makes a lot of sense as a concept still.

<comment><USER64> IMO it's pretty much useless (and possibly even harmful) and a failed experiment. GoatCounter intentionally ignores it. Context: [https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html](https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> [https://count.ly](https://count.ly) also looks pretty neat as a self hosted solution. Anyone experience with that?

</comment><comment><USER86> Of course you can now do Google Analytics server-side with GTM: [https://www.optimics.cz/what-is-gtm-server-side-tracking- and...](https://www.optimics.cz/what-is-gtm-server-side-tracking-and-why-do- you-need-it/)

Have GCP? Hit this button and you get your docker container in your Kubernetes cluster doing all the stuff for you, pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER87> I recently started using Kindmetrics, a very simple analytics tool written in Crystal. Looks very similar to Plausible actually, it may have been inspired by it.

[https://kindmetrics.io/](https://kindmetrics.io/)

[https://github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics](https://github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics)

</comment><comment><USER88> I too wished for a simpler, less invasive but still Javascript based, esthetically pleasing and free analytics solution (I am a cheap student) : [https://github.com/Karalix/feu-analytics](https://github.com/Karalix/feu- analytics)

The Firebase free tier seemed perfect for my use case. It is far from being perfect, but Good Enough For Me™

</comment><comment><USER89> Been using Fathom for a few months now (after migrating away from Gaug.es which I've had for at least 6-7 years prior but they got acquired by some random companies that has zero support and makes no improvements) and have been loving it so far. They're really responsive and always improving things. I like that I can cname the tracking script to my domain

<comment><USER90> Also using fathom and really like it! Not having to put up a GPDR tracking popup is very nice, I find those quite annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I have my own solution inspired by plausible.io and Simple analytics. See [https://tildegit.org/severak/millions](https://tildegit.org/severak/millions)

I used Matomo before, but simple dashboard in style of plausible.io is more useful for me. I have a little traffic on my sites.

</comment><comment><USER92> In my blog I started using Netlify's analytics which are server based and cost $9 per month (up to a number of views) and I gotta say they are extremely basic and lackluster. I paid for the subscription for one month but I don't think I will keep on paying.

Edit:

Also it doesn't seem to be tracking referrers correctly.

<comment><USER10> Yes, Netlify Analytics are bad. Try Fathom.

<comment><USER92> I'm sure it's a better service but at $14 per month (or $140 per year) for a low traffic blog it's too expensive. I don't need anything that fancy.

I moved to Netlify analytics from Goat counter because I liked the idea of having server side analytics, but at $9 per month these are extremely overpriced.

I think I will just go back to Goat counter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> The best alternative to Google Analytics is Parse.ly [1]. It's privacy- conscious, reliable, and user-friendly. Most importantly, it gives you important engagement metrics instead of vanity metrics.

[1][https://parse.ly/overview](https://parse.ly/overview)

<comment><USER59> If you are related to parse.ly: it's really confusing that clicking "pricing" doesn't show the pricing first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Still no real alternative when on a Github page, or am I missing something?

It's not that I really _need_ statistics, but sometimes it would be nice to know if there is even _anything_ going on or you're just screaming into a void.

But I refuse to spam visitors of my pages with GA.

<comment><USER95> The GH pages are still in a repo, so the repo's Insights: Traffic can show some stats on visits.

[https://github.blog/2014-01-07-introducing-github-traffic- an...](https://github.blog/2014-01-07-introducing-github-traffic-analytics/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> If you have an AWS account and want a lightweight, cheap and privacy-friendly alternative, you can have a look at [https://github.com/ownstats/ownstats](https://github.com/ownstats/ownstats) as well.

<comment><USER97> I guess this isn't usable outside of AWS? It's unfortunate that it's tightly coupled to one particular provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Until one of these alternatives is completely free like Google Analytics is I don't see a massive shift happening. I'm a web developer and there's no way I'd convince my clients to pay $20/month for something that Google offers for free.

<comment><USER10> There's a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics isn't "free". You're sending data to a company that has a huge amount of privacy scandals.

We have lots of agencies who use us, and their clients may differ from yours, but here's what's helped them: [https://usefathom.com/blog/switch](https://usefathom.com/blog/switch)

<comment><USER71> > There's a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics > isn't "free".

Just be aware that, while that is true for HN, and some subreddits, that still doesn't apply to most people. It's the same as saying, based on comments on HN, that people are moving away from Chrome when its market share is not going down.

<comment><USER10> I mean outside of HN :) HN makes up < 1% of our customers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Does anyone have experience with passive fingerprinting? I thought about implementing it into our Go backend as a middleware of some kind and track that way. I haven't found anything like it so far, but it would be ideal to track without cookies.

<comment><USER64> I did a write-up of solutions that I'm aware of here: [https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessio...](https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessions.markdown) – happy to add more if anyone knows of any.

<comment><USER10> The Fathom one isn't accurate and references an old article. I'll submit a PR in a few weeks if I remember :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Analytics isn't count a pageviews.

GA also counts - social interaction, events, Ecommerce and many more.

</comment><comment><USER101> I've been building Watch.ly, which can provide you reporting like this (this is the daily email, mine in this case)

[http://imgur.com/gallery/EP8jNTk](http://imgur.com/gallery/EP8jNTk)

</comment><comment><USER102> All of these web tracker alternatives but what I've really been itching for is a very low barrier to entry, no hassle to scale, easy/fast to query adhoc event tracker. Something like a self hosted amplitude or keen.

<comment><USER59> Hmm, depends on what you mean by "easy/fast to query". Is something with a GraphQL API easy/fast to query? Or should it have some UI to do it?

I wonder if it's easy to just send events to something like Firebase and then query that DB.

<comment><USER102> Fast adhoc aggregations over firestore isn't a reasonable possibility.

A graphql api or not doesn't really matter since that's just an abstraction for querying a service or database.

I really mean something like an open source Amplitude or Keen where you can dump events into it and then aggregate/group them in any way you like on demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> We have been using a self-hosted matomo for our company site for years now (back from when it was called piwik). Highly recommend it! The satisfaction you get out of not using any google product is unsurpassed.

</comment><comment><USER104> We run our own analytics solution based on a js library, a small go app and ClickHouse for data aggregation. With a very cheap and small setup you can handle hundreds of millions of events per day.

</comment><comment><USER105> What are alternatives to Google Analytics for mobile? We'd just like to collect basic events (eg. this feature has been used), number of active users, OS usage… nothing fancy.

</comment><comment><USER106> Engauge Analytics is a good alternative, and privacy focused: [https://engaugeanalytics.com/](https://engaugeanalytics.com/)

</comment><comment><USER107> Goat counter's been good and doesn't fingerprint.

<comment><USER10> Yes it does - [https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessio...](https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessions.markdown#goatcounters- solution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> For static web pages I like [https://disqus.com](https://disqus.com) Has comment and minor analytics support.

</comment><comment><USER109> Are there any good HeapAnalytics-like frontend widget that can do auto- tracing? The collect-everything retrospective analytics is great tool.

</comment><comment><USER110> I have been a happy Plausible subscriber for the last 3 months. It's handled 100k+ unique visitors a month with no problem.

</comment><comment><USER111> I stick to GA because I fear that removing it could impact my site's ranking. Is it an unfounded fear, anyone knows?

<comment><USER112> We actually looked into this:

[https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics- seo](https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo)

Funny as it sounds, using Fathom instead of GA could increase your SEO rankings :)

<comment><USER111> Thank you! I'll give it a shot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> If you're using Ruby on Rails, perhaps consider the "Ahoy Matey" AKA "Ahoy" free and open source gem created by Instacart [1].

I've used it in my personal projects and have never had any issues. It's great to have no vendor lock-in and full ownership of user metric data. If you go this route, please be responsible with the data and follow all relevant regulations & guidelines (ex: GDPR) regarding its storage and usage.

[1]: [https://github.com/ankane/ahoy](https://github.com/ankane/ahoy)

</comment><comment><USER114> I've recently been pondering whether to create a log receiver that will produce Prometheus metrics as well as logs for Loki.

Why?

Because there are several open source projects that if joined up in a relatively simple way would provide a full RUM / Analytics solution.

For collecting the analytics: Akamai Boomerang, which is a descendant of Yahoo tooling [https://github.com/akamai/boomerang](https://github.com/akamai/boomerang) and BSD licensed

Then insert a collector that will produce Prometheus metrics and write log lines. The metrics will provide the timing information and in many ways will be richer than Google Analytics, and the log lines will provide the potentially high cardinality of string based data like user agents, URIs, etc and Grafana supports PromQL queries against logs such that you can gain metrics from the log lines too.

Then add in a free Grafana Cloud [https://grafana.com/products/cloud/](https://grafana.com/products/cloud/) and configure Prometheus to scrape from the collector, and Loki to consume the logs.

This is an end-to-end cloud hosted RUM / Analytics solution that for a single user would be free and one can even add alerting.

The missing link is that collector, to consume the Boomerang output and produce Prometheus metrics and log lines for Loki.

All of this is open source and can be self hosted, the only piece you would have to host today would be that custom collector to receive the Boomerang requests.

</comment><comment><USER115> Piwik PRO is also worth checking out. Our functionality matches GA. Our analytics is more focused on user privacy and is inline with privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA or industry regulations like HIPAA or EBA guidelines.

Check out a comprehensive comparison of GA, GA360 & Piwik PRO at: [https://piwik.pro/blog/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics- compreh...](https://piwik.pro/blog/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics- comprehensive-comparison/)

<comment><USER115> Actually I meant sharing this link to the comparison table: [https://piwik.pro/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-vs- ga360/](https://piwik.pro/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-vs-ga360/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> A happy Matomo user

</comment><comment><USER117> I briefly tried Matomo, but didn't want the Javascript component and really just wanted log analysis. It's okay at log analysis, but it doesn't really shine unless you do javascript live tracking.

So I disabled it and went back to awstats. I've been using awstats for over a decade, and for my personal site and projects, it pretty much gives me the majority of the data I really care about.

I might look at shipping more complex nginx json logs to logstash/elastic search, but then I'd need to visualize them in Kibana and that just seems like a lot of heavy weight containers to run for stats I don't really need.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for all the kind words about [https://usefathom.com](https://usefathom.com). We've been in business since 2018 and both founders now work full time on it.

We're fully bootstrapped, actively rejecting millions of dollars in venture capital, and we are sustainable. That is the key. We are priced fairly, and at a level that allows us to ensure the longevity of our business.

We are used by governments, small businesses, multi billion dollar companies and individuals. Everyone cares about privacy and legal teams love us.

We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies. A lot of people have read our article on cookie-free tracking, but that article is outdated now. We're also launching a new method over the next few weeks which is game changing, which we'll blog about.

Our infrastructure is highly available and runs across multiple servers. We don't run our services from a single VPS, and have availability in multiple availability zones for everything. We pay premiums for our infrastructure because we take our customers data very seriously.

We allow you to set-up a custom domain in less than 2 minutes, comfortably passing ad-blockers. Or if that's not your cup of tea, you can enable honor- DNT and respect ad-blockers.

We are built to handle billions of pageviews a month, we've poured hundreds (thousands?) of hours into refining our aggregation script, and we're the leading solution on the market.

Don't forget, we also offer unlimited uptime monitoring as part of your plan, sending alerts by SMS, Telegram, email and Slack.

Finally, we run a popular podcast called Above Board, where we talk about business & privacy.

If you haven't already checked us out, you should.

<comment><USER118> > We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies.

From the GitHub repo [1]:

> At present, Fathom Analytics Lite is not PECR compliant due to the fact that > it uses an anonymous cookie. Our PRO version is PECR compliant, and we'll be > making changes to this codebase some time in the future to make it > compliant.

The open source version seems to be lacking behind and might generally be treated without much love, given that their website doesn't even link to it (which is understandable from a business point of view, but doesn't inspire much confidence in its future maintenance).

[1]: [https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/blob/69baac5c4a4d96880a2...](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/blob/69baac5c4a4d96880a28be1c82a519b43deda3b9/README.md)

<comment><USER10> Our goal is long term sustainability of privacy-focused analytics. We're achieving that. We tried to do it with the OS codebase, and the original tech guy left the project. The MRR was around $1,300 between 2 people after many months.

When we focused on building a business, we were able to become a much more viable competitor to Google Analytics.

The reason we haven't written off Fathom Lite is because we've always had plans to come back to it this year and put out an update. Will we be launching new features? No. Will we be fixing bugs and ensuring it's a solid product for individuals? Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> This is super helpful! I posted an article here a few weeks about trying to build my own minimal alternative to GA, but I had no idea all of these existed and would happily have used one of these instead of doing it myself: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351323)</comment>


How long did your U.S. green card take? - <AUTHOR> The U.S. green card process seems to take an astonishingly long time (assuming you aren't taking advantage of corrupt government employees).  A feeling of lock-in with your current job adds to the frustration, because quitting can jeopardize or reset a permanent residency application that has been going on for months.
U.S. immigrants, how long did your card take?  Did it seem to benefit from theoretically-irrelevant factors like which company you worked for?  And, does it seem like the high tech industry is any faster for acquiring a green card (compared to, say, these people who seem to get cards after crossing the border under questionable circumstances)? <comment><USER2> I could probably write several pages on this, so I'll try and keep it succinct: much depends on what category you file under. Employment-based Green Cards are filed typically under EB1/2 or 3. Make sure you don't let your employer and the lawyer make all your choices. Do some research.

An EB1 filing is the fastest - but you typically need a PhD or equivalent to qualify. Most other filings are in EB2/EB3 which approximate a MS/BS educational equivalent. EB1s could go as 'fast' as 1-2 years wheras EB2/EB3 could take 3-5 years.

These are typical numbers - counting from the day you file. I know folks that got it in just over a year in EB2 and folks that are still waiting 6 years after filing. All the best!

</comment><comment><USER3> Good lawyers help.

What also matters is what group are you fitting into. Having a diploma which is evaluated to Master Degree of American university speeds up a process significantly. Process with Bachelor Degree is pretty slow. There is also an extra quota for those who have American education. And the process is much faster for those ones.

My EBGC process took about 20 months for the whole family. It could be faster, but I had to reschedule fingerprint exams for 2 or 3 months, being out of the country. My lawyers were pretty expensive, but they are much worth it. :) I have MS of CS from foreign university. It was evaluated to the Master Degree. I also have a bunch of certificates, but I don't think they play any difference.

Originally coming on H1B for two years and H2 for the rest of the family, I didn't have to prolong it and I also didn't use advance parole and work authorization (although, my lawyers made them for me).

I'm working for a pretty small company (less then 20 employees). My original position was not anything special, a regular IT fit, so I don't think it matters.

I have spent a lot of time learning the whole process and one of the most important concerns is the lawyers. They can help or they can kill.

Feel free to drop me a message to w at qwe3 dot com if you have any more questions.

P.S. I have a friend in SF waiting for his EBGC for almost 6 years now. Nothing, yet.

<comment><USER4> Could you please share the name of the lawyers you approached. You are quite true that the lawyers can make or kill it. The application process will be at least half the trouble if you have a good lawyer representing you. Also, I have heard the lawyer fee can run up to $10K. Is this true?

<comment><USER5> +1 to the comment about good lawyers making or breaking; my wife went with Paul Parsons located in Austin, TX - <http://www.immigrate-usa.com/> \- paid less than $10k (though it was not an EC1/2 case), and got a green card in less than 2 years time, despite moving to another state during this process and having to transfer the case. We consider ourselves lucky to have worked with him and his team.

<comment><USER3> My congrats. Case transfer between states often leads to unexpected delays. Actually, it's one of the most popular reasons to get your case delayed for years - it's being simply lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _assuming you aren't taking advantage of corrupt government employees_

Bribery happens here less often than you probably think.

I have lived in the US for 47 years and never has anyone confided in me that they bribed an employee of the US government although of course I have read about bribery in the newspapers.

The Feds pay their employees enough to live comfortably, and an employee never knows whether someone offering a bribe is working with the FBI on a sting operation.

<comment><USER7> There's more than one way to be corrupt.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/nyregion/21immigrant.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/nyregion/21immigrant.html?_r=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I came here in 2001 to join Microsoft on H1. Worked there for almost 4 years, then got fed up and left. Joined a small company in Los Angeles, transferred my H1 there. My GC process was restarted. Finally received my green card in the end of the last year. It took me almost 7 years. I have MS in Economics and PhD in CS from foreign universities.

</comment><comment><USER9> My wife's took 5 months, but then she married a local. :) But before that was a three-year tragicomedy with all the problems you bring up, plus another nasty one: the "visa discount". Large employers love to cut your salary by 15-20% if they can get away with it. What are you going to do? Quit?

<comment><USER5> One company's unofficial policy was that they would let foreigners located in the US 'volunteer' at their job with no pay and decide to support their visa after three months of 'volunteering'. Not sure about the legality on that one...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm still on an H1-B work visa for 3 years. They said they will consider it once my term is nearing its end.

<comment><USER3> I consider you're talking about your employers, aren't you? As far as I know H1B can be extended to 5 years at max (2+2+1), so you should better hurry up. Propose them to share the costs of legal process if it will make them move up. I doubt you will have fun extending your advance parole and work authorization every year while waiting for your EBGC.

Keep in mind that there are some restrictions on owning the company which brought you on H1B and which sponsored EBGC for you. If your lawyer doesn't know anything about that, fire him and find another one.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all of your responses so far. I guess my case is typical, which is what I was afraid of. :)

For those on visas, note that the limit on H1s goes away as long as you apply for a green card before your last visa expires. You are supposed to receive new H1s for as long as the green card takes.

<comment><USER11> Actually, only the first time that you ever apply for a visa, you are fighting the quota. Then onwards, you are just reusing the same number - so no worries there. [this is good until the 6 years of eligibility of h1].

Secondly, if your application had been pending for more than year, then you can keep your h1 alive (even after 6 years), and use your pending-gc- application to get h1-renewals.

Lastly, if you get past the first two and a half stages of the greencard process and you get an EAD _and_ you have worked 180+ days with your employer, then, as Southwest says, you are free to move about the country. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> They say the third time is a charm - and I am on my third application - pending for about 3 years. The previous two times (first in 2001, the company went bankrupt. The second time in about 2003, but I left the company after a couple of years).

Sometimes, it is just a matter of luck. There was one in 1998 (when suddenly everyone got "current" and could move on with life). Then, there was a period in 2000-to-mid-2001 when the whole process took less than a year (for even high-demand countries like Mexico, India and China). There was a recent event (in July/August of 2007) - but that was only a partially-lucky event since many bad things happened after that.

</comment><comment><USER12> I came over from UK on a L1-B, with a big oil company.

About 98 or so, the process was started and I got my GC in June 2001. The lawyers were Amdur and Amdur in Houston who were great to work with. I have no idea of the cost though I imagine it probably ran to 10 or 20 k.

I was lucky, as many companies shut down the process in the recession that started around then.

I also have a masters from University of Aberdeen, which was accredited as equivalent to a US masters degree. I'm sure that helped.

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh..visit <http://www.immigrationvoice.org/> \- and post your exact scenario. Lots of helpful folks there. And if you search the archives, you might just find someone with your situation might've already asked the same questions.

</comment><comment><USER13> 4 months; I had a really good lawyer and qualified for EB1. Another thing to consider is what processing office you will go thru - the line is longer say in San Francisco than it is in Pittsburgh.

<comment><USER3> I assume you're not talking about the whole EBGC process. I don't believe it's possible to file a case and pass through all steps in just four months. And actually I never heard it can happen in less then 10 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well anyway you still can play GC lottery. If there is a chance, why not trying it? ;) My brother was one among hundred of thousands who's used that chance.

<comment><USER11> The lottery is available to only certain countries' applicants. (Generally the countries which do not use the full quota due to lack of applicants).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Your mileage for responses will be higher if you post in an immigration forum/newsgroup.

<comment><USER15> Looks like he's getting some very useful responses right here. I'm amazed at all the shit the US foists off on these people, and am nervous the authorities are going to be a big hassle for my wife if we ever move back there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All I had to do was trade some beads for Manhattan.

(Scratches head).</comment>


Jean Bourgain - <AUTHOR> https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/jean-bourgain/ <comment><USER2> Tangential, but Tao is such a great teacher of mathematics and person. A rare combination of skill and modesty. Highly recommend his analysis and measure theory textbooks.

<comment><USER3> > [..] Tao is such a great teacher of mathematics and person.

And a good writer too. I could read his blog posts all day long. In this post I particularly like how he describes his feelings when reading through one of Jean's papers.

>> _It's hard to describe (especially in lay terms) the experience of reading through (and finally absorbing) the sections of this paper one by one; the best analogy I can come up with would be watching an expert video game player nimbly navigate his or her way through increasingly difficult levels of some video game, with the end of each level (or section) culminating in a fight with a huge "boss" that was eventually dispatched using an array of special weapons that the player happened to have at hand._

> A rare combination of skill and modesty.

That's what I was thinking when reading the following paragraph. He is one of the greatest mathematicians of our times but what he writes is so relatable.

>> _While I was a graduate student at Princeton, Jean worked at the Institute for Advanced Study which was just a mile away. But I never actually had the courage to set up an appointment with him (which, back then, would be more likely done in person or by phone rather than by email). I remember once actually walking to the Institute and standing outside his office door, wondering if I dared knock on it to introduce myself._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fascinating video. I use Fourier analysis all the time. It's a foundational tool of controls engineering, which is my field. But I never knew it was invented to describe thermal dynamics problems.

<comment><USER5> Depending on where you draw the line (heh), Lagrange's vibrating string work predates the heat equation work by a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I learned so much from Bourgain's work. While most of his work was in Fourier analysis, and later in number theory, he really was a very versatile analyst. Just two of his early papers, on embeddings of metric spaces, and on concentration for covariance matrices started whole fields later. They are very useful now in theoretical machine learning.

<comment><USER7> Interesting! Could you share examples of works in theoretical ML using these ?

<comment><USER6> Well, lets try. For the embeddings, you'll have to search the internet for details, and this may be not a "proper" ML. But the general idea is that if you have some nice euclidean algorithm, like k-means, and you want to cluster some data w.r.t a different metric, you could try putting the data in the euclidean space without distorting the distances too much and then apply the algo. there. For k-means in particular the nearest neighbor search in Euclidean space can be made efficient, I think. This didn't take off much because most of the results were unfortunately negative. Although there were some recent positive results, even with discussion here [1]. Bourgain had some early results on the embeddability of finite metric spaces into classical spaces.

The concentration of covariance matrices is fundamental for most "spectral" methods, in particular spectral clustering. See for instance [2]. People proved and reproved these concentration results a lot of times, but Bourgain's was the earliest with N\log N sample complexity for log concave measures, improving on a result of Lovazs et al. (!!!) More importantly, the method with which he proved this, controlling the concentration by decomposing into bounded and "rarely non-zero" parts is now all around in statistical learning theory. So each time people want to prove uniform law of large numbers and nothing standard works, people try to find a good decomposition.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17752836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17752836) [2] Clustering with Spectral Norm and the k-means Algorithm, Amit Kumar and Ravindran Kannan (Section 6...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bourgain's paper on monotone expanders is the most difficult paper I have tried to read, since it has some implications on open questions in computational complexity. Spoiler alert: I have still not understood it.

<comment><USER9> Is this the paper you're referencing? [https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2555](https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2555)

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's the one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > I began to realise that Jean had a certain collection of tools, heuristics, > and principles that he regarded as "basic", such as dyadic decomposition and > the uncertainty principle, and by working "modulo" these tools (that is, by > regarding any step consisting solely of application of these tools as > trivial), one could proceed much more rapidly and efficiently.

Does anybody know what those "basic" tools and heuristics are? Has anybody created a list of them somewhere for others to understand the papers more easily?

<comment><USER10> The answer is in the blog comments:

>Dear Terry,

>Have you ever considered writing a blog post on "Bourgain's toolbox" summarizing the kinds of techniques used continually (without explanation) in his papers?

>[...]

Tao's final conclusion, besides other hints like [http://www.tricki.org/](http://www.tricki.org/) is:

> I think that ultimately the best way to acquire these tools is to constantly > be exposed to interesting new mathematics, whether it is through reading a > challenging paper from an expert, or listening to a talk on a topic outside > your own specialty, or by working (particularly with collaborators) on a > problem outside of your own comfort zone. Bourgain is not the only author > whose writings happen to be particularly worth investing the effort to > properly read; I for instance found reading Szemeredi's work or Perelman's > work to be a broadly similar experience, and I am sure that there are > several other mathematicians with this property also.

<comment><USER10> Though:

>Eventually, though, and with the help of Eli Stein and Tom Wolff, I managed to decode the steps which had mystified me – and my impression of the paper reversed completely.

If he hasn't managed to do this on his own, how should anybody else acquire those tools just by reading challenging papers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is a beautiful memorial. Thank you Terry for writing it, and helping me appreciate Jean's life and work better.

</comment><comment><USER12> Also off-topic: Why are 6 of the 8 'comments' on that page autocomments merely saying that it's a top story on HN? That seems a bit excessive.

edit: Ah, downvoted within seconds. This is a Displeasing Question apparently. Sorry for whyever that is. But I'm curious. ..and won't be bullied into deleting the question.

<comment><USER2> Upvoted you, I asked myself the same question. Looks like a bot that annoys bloggers by notifying them that their writing is trending on various aggregators.

<comment><USER13> The "pingbacks" are common on WordPress blog using WordPress comments. As you mentioned they simply appear when another website provides a backlink.

This is default behavior, but most disable it.</comment></comment></comment>


Windows Kernel Debugging and Exploitation: Setting up the lab - <AUTHOR> https://voidsec.com/windows-kernel-debugging-exploitation/ <comment><USER2> > COM Port debugging

If you can otherwise use Hyper-V, I'd strongly recommend using kdnet debugging[0]. It offers a noticeably much faster experience.

[0] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows- hardware/drivers/de...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows- hardware/drivers/debugger/setting-up-a-network-debugging-connection)

<comment><USER3> The article covers that. But points out it only works in 8.1 and above. The article is debugging Windows 7 at the start.</comment></comment>


What future for BT and the UK's broadband? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35657807 <comment><USER2> "Perhaps one of the most interesting conclusions was a perceived conflict of interest between having the company responsible for the UK's broadband network part of the same company that is a leading internet service provider."

 _Perceived?_

<comment><USER3> I don't quite understand why these natural monopolies are run by the private sector.

I can see why you might get sub-contractors to help maintain the network, but shouldn't the infrastructure be in public hands?

Is it just market dogma?

<comment><USER4> Originally, it was all just British Telecom, which was a government-owned monopoly. That was split up into BT and OpenReach and privatized in the 1980's, as part of a general market movement.

Putting the infrastructure into public hands has upsides and downsides. If the public is willing to invest money, you can get a pretty workable system: e.g. the Paris subway. If the public isn't willing to invest the money, you can get a very bad system, e.g. Flint Michigan's water supply.

More often than not, public ownership leads to under-investment. In the U.S., for every enlightened municipality like New York that carefully manages its water supply, there are dozens that keep water rates far too low and consequently lack the money to upgrade miles of decaying lead pipes.

All told, BT OpenReach is probably one of the better ways of organizing this function at scale. It's ostensibly private, but it was privatized with a carefully-designed system of incentives to keep investing in infrastructure. OpenReach is, for example, much more profitable than Verizon's wireline division. That's why they're still at least building fiber, instead of trying to get out of the business entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone linked to B4RN [1] the other day: community owned, non profit, symmetric gigabit internet in the north west of England, for £30 / month.

If more of these networks spring up, then maybe something good will come of BT's tardiness in laying decent infrastructure. Granted, B4RN is strongly enabled by being able to easily lay fibre under farmland, but there are other models that are more appropriate in urban areas - see e.g. the guifi network [2] in Catalonia.

[1]: [http://b4rn.org.uk](http://b4rn.org.uk) [2]: [http://guifi.net](http://guifi.net)

</comment><comment><USER6> FTTC is just putting more lipstick on the pig.

In France I am not aware of anyone using FTTC. FTTP is the standard and is now widely deployed in large cities. That comparison alone should hurt the pride of the British people!

[http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/](http://www.superfast- openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/) try the post code "SW1A 2AA" (i.e. 10 downing street). Status of the exchange: no plan for optic fiber roll out.

I hope the CEO of BT always keeps on himself a one-way ticket to a country with no extradition treaty with the UK!

<comment><USER7> FTTC provides a decent connection speed ("up to" 76Mbps according to BT) but my main gripe with it is that I have to continue with the archaic process of "renting" the copper telephone line between the exchange and my house - for a sum almost the same as the broadband itself. Openreach have clung onto this cash cow by opting for FTTC over FTTP, forcing customers to rent a telephone line they don't want

<comment><USER8> I recently changed ISP and told them the copper line was part of the broadband package with my previous ISP (for an extra £10/month) and was assured everything was fine.

One month after the transfer, Openreach ceases the PSTN line and the reaction from my new ISP was "well it's your responsibility to keep up your BT subscription" (never had BT).

Two weeks later, the PSTN line is still dark, and I'm waiting for Openreach to install a new MPF line provided by my current ISP (for an extra £10/month of course).

Apparently the reason for doing this rather than re-start the PSTN line is part of a process called "Local-loop unbundling".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local- loop_unbundling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling)

<comment><USER9> I'm amazed they still can't get LLU -> BT/LLU -> LLU migrations right. We sold ADSL as a second tier provider and once upon a time if you were on an LLU service and needed to migrate to another LLU provider the only sure-fire way of doing it so it didn't fuck up was to migrate back to a BT based service then migrate again. We once had a business customer, paying proper business coin migrate from one LLU provider to another. On the day of the migration the gaining provider's engineer didn't turn up to pick up the pairs and jumper onto their rack which left the customer without service for over 24 hours. So glad I don't have to deal with that crap any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a lot of bureaucracy in getting anything done with BT/OpenReach. Most of the contracts have to go through BT first who sub-contract to OpenReach even though they are the same company.

The partnership where OpenReach does everything for the infrastructure and BT adds absolutely no value. The split of the partnership would have been what the consumers wanted.

Th decision falls short of bringing much needed change in the industry. There is still huge number of people who have super-slow internet which is a HUGE shame for ofcom for not having been able to get this problem sorted.

In my area, I get internet speed of 2MBps. I cannot get even basic things done. To put things into perspective, to download 100 photos, it would take 10 minutes.

Ofcom - This is the twenty first century and you are still living under a rock.

 __Edit - Thanks Xophmeister for spotting the typo

<comment><USER11> It's actually the 21st century, which I suppose makes your complaint even more justified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> On a lot of the green street cabinets is effectively a massive advert for BT by Openreach (big white sticker, covering most of the cabinet). The green cabinets are supposed to be discreet, I wonder if the banner pasted on the side is included in any of their planning applications?

<comment><USER13> One near to me last year said "Superfast BT broadband is here". Apparently superfast to be BT means unreliable 8mbps

<comment><USER14> I also hate having to do this mental adjustment - in my head, even 40Mbps isn't "superfast" \- it's above the national average, sure - give me 100Mbps, then maybe you can justify using that label

<comment><USER15> Sadly, superfast broadband has a different definition depending on who you ask. [http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/08/lets-stop- diffe...](http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/08/lets-stop-different-uk- definitions-superfast-broadband.html) And now I see Ofcom are throwing terms like "ultrafast" broadband around. I wish they'd just quote minimum speeds (Ofcom's universal service obligation minimum is 10Mbps).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cornwall (where I live) got trumpeted as a target for superfast broadband. As far as I can tell, it's mostly a marketing exercise. The town I live in (~25k people) has loads of green boxes with the livery and I see vans quite often but in the five years I've live here (four different properties), I've never been able to get superfast. I know precisely one person who has it and describes it as "rubbish".

I'm sure there's people that it's working out wonderfully for but I've never found them.

Some kind of shake up is needed in the industry, similar to when cable came in around 2000(?).

<comment><USER17> Yes it's interesting. Fellow Cornwall resident here and it's the same, every check on the site says that my area is in consultation.

I moved down from Worcestershire last year, only a few miles outside of Worcester but also very slightly rural and exactly the same happened there.

What I guess is happening is they connect up the very centre of large towns/cities and then don't really have any intention of providing fast broadband to the more rural areas, probably because it's not economical.

<comment><USER16> I actually think it might be somewhat the opposite; there's less messy infrastructure in smaller places and so they're perhaps more likely to get it. I know that a few little places outside of Truro got it, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some new buildings are wired by OpenReach with FTTP.

What amazes me is that Hyperoptic sells 1gbps internet over OpenReach fiber but BT only sells 300mbps (at a higher price) [http://arstechnica.co.uk/information- technology/2015/08/hand...](http://arstechnica.co.uk/information- technology/2015/08/hands-on-with-hyperoptic-gigabit-fibre-the-uks-fastest- residential-internet-connection/)

<comment><USER19> Yeah, a friend of mine just moved into a new build with FTTP. Signed up with BT for a 12 month contract. Then got a letter in the post saying Hyperoptic was available in his building :/

The price difference, let along the speed difference, between the two companies offerings is insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not a single mention of G.Fast? WTF

BT is leading companies around the world testing out G.Fast, the next generation of DSL technology. Which should give you 500Mbps over 250M of cooper cables.

Because there are no upgrade done on users part other then a modem. This could be quickly rolled out many UK citizens, while others will wait for cabinet to move a little closer to them. Both will be much cheaper and quicker to deploy then FTTH.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nobody seems to want to invest in laying new fibre. Openreach already offered access to ducts and poles, and OfCom have only said that they're making it 'easier'. If you look at the price of residential broadband, I can see why nobody wants to invest - broadband is too cheap, and I'd bet people wouldn't want to pay a large installation fee.

<comment><USER3> Note that speed is not the only thing that separates rural and town broadband; it's also price.

Yes, broadband is cheap in towns and cities. But go to the countryside and it's a different story. For me - £25/month (Andrews & Arnold) plus £8/month line rental (Primus).

<comment><USER9> I'm with A&A as well, and rural based, wouldn't touch any other provider with a 100ft long barge pole.

Our village finally got FTTC cab#1 activated at the end of December (cab#2 which served a much smaller segment of the village went live in September), has made a world of difference for us folks working from home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> __Elsewhere in the world __

Google 's project Loon has done an amazing feat that they will achieve full internet coverage for the entire country Sri Lanka by end of next month using 4G LTE network.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anecdata: I live in central london and the best connection I can get is a 12mbit ADSL2+ line :-(

<comment><USER23> Sounds about what I was able to get when I lived there in 2006-2008. Can't say I'm surprised they haven't improved.

On the other hand, in the past 5 years, my cable speeds in Oslo have increased from 20/5 to 250/20, and supposedly I might have an option to get 500/50 sometime soon. Would still prefer fiber, but I can't complain nearly as much as a lot of people!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given that their 21st Century Network was built upon IPv4 with a complete ignorance of IPv6, you'd have to think a split and replacement with someone more competent would be a vital part of growing the UK's technical economy.

<comment><USER25> It's largely irrelevant that 21CN runs IPv4 as it's implemented as MPLS VPN switching network. What the customer (i.e an ISP) gets presented with is basically an L2 ethernet connection, over which they can run whatever protocol they want, including IPv6. There are competent ISPs available that will utilise OpenReach and that do offer IPv6. BT Retail is not one of these.

The real issues with 21CN are that many parts of the edge network have multiple SPOFs (so a single failure can result in multi-hour or longer downtime for customers served by multiple ISPs that connected to an exchange) as well as insufficient bandwidth provisioned for those links in some areas. Another issue, is that backhaul from exchanges is metered at a fairly expensive rate.</comment></comment>