[HN Gopher] Show HN: Self-hosted alternative to Hotjar and Googl...
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Show HN: Self-hosted alternative to Hotjar and Google Analytics
Author : XCSme
Score : 31 points
Date : 2020-10-11 16:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usertrack.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usertrack.net)
| supz_k wrote:
| Hi. I'm surprised that you have run this platform for 8 years.
| That's incredible!
|
| There's one question I want to ask you. Do you have any
| experience handling millions of traffic? I saw that you are using
| MYSQL for storage. I assume each pageview is stored in a row. So,
| from my experience MYSQL is very slow performing aggregated
| queries on those datasets (We recently moved to Clickhouse due to
| this). I'd like to know your experiences on handling millions of
| rows in MYSQL, if you have any :)
| XCSme wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Thank you! It was not hard to work on it for so long, time
| flies, and I only worked on it as a side-project for a long
| time. Most of the work was responding to support queries and
| talking to customers. The good thing when you do something over
| a long period of time is that you have lots of time to get good
| ideas and change/rethink parts of the product.
|
| I personally don't have any site that gets millions of users
| per month, but there are some customers using userTrack for
| around 300k sessions/month. That being said, I think of
| userTrack as a solution for small and medium businesses, not
| really something for huge enterprises that probably already
| have dedicated analytics teams and expensive software stacks.
|
| > Do you have any experience handling millions of traffic?
|
| I do have some experience with handling heavy traffic, not from
| userTrack, but from working on a multiplayer browser game with
| 300k+ monthly users. There we used MongoDB, and the servers
| handled it pretty well without huge focus on performance or
| scaling.
|
| > from my experience MYSQL is very slow performing aggregated
| queries on those datasets
|
| From what I've seen so far, MySQL is really fast if the queries
| are done right. If everything has an index and most of the
| results are filtered, then most queries run without any
| performance issues, even if the database gets bigger (talking
| about several or tens of GBs, not about terra-bytes).
|
| I am curious what was your bottle-neck with those queries and
| how the aggregation was being done. Did you run the queries
| with EXPLAIN to see why they were slow?
| XCSme wrote:
| Hi HN friends!
|
| Over the last 8 years I worked on userTrack.net as a side-
| project. userTrack is a self-hosted analytics platform that
| provides multiple tools to understand what visitors are doing on
| your site.
|
| It initially started as a heatmap/session-recording tool but
| since October 2019 I started working on it full-time and managed
| to add more features such as stats/graphs, segments and a way to
| easily A/B test copy on a landing page. I would say that it can
| now be used as a replacement for both Hotjar and Google
| Analytics, thus eliminating the need of relying on 3rd parties
| for analytics.
|
| I think the platform most similar to userTrack is Matomo, as it
| has a similar feature set and it is also self-hosted. The biggest
| difference between userTrack and Matomo is how
| modern/friendly/fast the dashboards are and the pricing structure
| (as far as I know, Matomo only provides heatmaps/session-
| recordings for their cloud-only subscriptions).
|
| I have been regularly released updates (see changelog at the
| bottom) and improved userTrack based on existing customer
| feedback (2000+ webmasters). In total I earned from it about $60k
| in 8 years of being a side-project (which is only around
| $6k/year, but enough to keep me going).
|
| My bigger goal is to make self-hosting in general a lot more
| appealing for non-technical users or small businesses who can't
| afford sys admins and they have to rely on "free" services that
| affect the privacy of their users and even of their own data. I
| think this is not only possible, but the expected future. We just
| have to create useful products that can be self-hosted AND find
| an easy way to allow users to install/use them.
|
| I am glad to answer any questions about userTrack, the tech
| stack, its history or myself.
|
| Demo (automatic login):
| https://dashboard.usertrack.net/server/demoLogin.php
|
| Changelog: https://docs.usertrack.net/changelog
|
| Roadmap: https://trello.com/b/z4HCNb15/usertrack-roadmap
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Good to see "Privacy: Option to disable full session
| recordings" is in your roadmap, but I think what a lot of users
| want is the ability to have full recordings, but have the text
| on the page "blocked out" and not sent to the server so you
| don't accidentally scrape up things like credit card numbers or
| PII. For an example see https://help.fullstory.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360044349073-Fu....
| XCSme wrote:
| You can already disable keyboard (form) input entirely or on
| specific fields by adding the "noRecord" class.
| https://docs.usertrack.net/api/client-side-api#4-disable-
| tra...
|
| Another thing to note is that userTrack uses a custom
| tracking method that doesn't actually store or send existing
| page content. This way it is A LOT more efficient and
| provides much better privacy. This also leads to some
| limitations in the way session recording and playback works,
| but for landing pages and static content it works as good as
| other methods. I have a more detailed explanation about how
| the session tracking works here:
| https://docs.usertrack.net/requirements-and-
| limitations/limi...
|
| EDIT: That FullStory docs page is a really good example of
| the feature you mentioned. They provide more options than
| userTrack does for filtering out specific recording input but
| currently their tracking method also stores more personal
| data than the one userTrack uses.
| l1am0 wrote:
| Are you planing a hosted solution? Actually I would prefer to
| just give some more cash and not host it myself :D
| XCSme wrote:
| I have considered it and I was actually thinking to put more
| emphasis of it. The thing I'm mostly worried about "hosted"
| versions is centralization. To avoid this, I do provide a
| managed alternative, where I create, host and maintain your
| VPS. This way, each installation is done on its own server
| and there is no direct way to easily aggregate data from
| multiple users.
|
| You can find more info on this page:
| https://www.usertrack.net/hosting
|
| Fun fact, the "Hosting" page was actually one of the three
| buttons in the navbar (Features, Hosting, Pricing), but I
| replaced Hosting with Demo as the way I'm marketing userTrack
| only attracted customers that wanted either the self-hosted
| version or the agency one (them being the one providing the
| hosted userTrack for others).
| XCSme wrote:
| To add to the previous comment: I mostly don't recommend the
| hosted solution because I tried to make self-hosting as easy
| as possible.
|
| You can set-up your own userTrack dashboard on DigitalOcean
| in a few clicks and use your own domain name. You can enable
| automatic backups and userTrack comes with an auto-updater
| system, so it doesn't need maintenance. If you encounter any
| issue you can still just contact support (me) and I will look
| over your installation to see what's wrong.
| rupertdev wrote:
| The feature set looks pretty good, the UI is decent enough (I
| personally dislike Material designed stuff but it's better than
| most), but frankly I think the name is a bit off-putting. Whether
| or not it's reality, people often don't like the idea of
| "tracking their users" but instead liking to think that they're
| only "gaining user analytics" which of course means the same
| thing in reality.
| XCSme wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I am also no longer a fan of Material
| design either, so I slowly started to get rid of some of the
| Material stlyes, but the UI is built on top of the MaterialUI
| React framework, so it might always somewhat resemble Material
| design in some way.
|
| I agree about the name, I was told multiple times by multiple
| people that the name sounds "evil". I have not gone forward
| with changing it as the SEO value of the domain and the
| userTrack brand has some traction and changing it might destroy
| the last 8 years spent on SEO and marketing.
|
| One good thing about the name is that people searching for
| "user tracking" and related keywords, which could lead to
| invasive solutions, now lead to a self-hosted option that has
| multiple privacy settings and is overall a better choice for
| the users than most hosted alternatives. I think of this
| consequence as something like getting "eartisflat.com" and
| putting there actual information proving that the earth is not
| flat, so although the user might have been looking for
| something else, he is now better off with the answer he got.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Re: "$129/life"
|
| I had to laugh when the pricing says it's $129 PER life.
|
| https://www.usertrack.net/hotjar-alternative
|
| Edit: I just dived into the demo. Nice work there! Great product.
| XCSme wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out! :)
|
| I think it's like that because there was previously shown the
| monthly pricing ($7.99 / month) but then I decided to use the
| lifetime one (even though it's higher than the monthly pricing
| of Hotjar, so it might not be as clear).
|
| I assume this means that you can not leave userTrack be
| inherited by your descendants!
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(page generated 2020-10-12 23:00 UTC)