GoAccess looks interesting; to be sincere, I haven't used it myself, but the demo website looks extremely fascinating to me! https://goaccess.io/

Check out GoatCounter: https://www.goatcounter.com/.

I've used it for six years and am quite happy with it.

Check out tirreno: https://play.tirreno.com (admin/tirreno)

It's self-hosted, PHP/Postgresql, server-side. Plus, you can get a free tier with 1,000 API requests/month if you want to enrich data about your IP visitors. As a co-founder, I believe it's one of the most advanced solutions available. (-;

If not joking, I use tirreno for some personal websites with partly masked IP as it shows very interesting insights about bots and their behavior.

Under 90s thing you probably mean is awstats (https://github.com/eldy/awstats). CERN and many other organizations continue to use it even now.

Since you are hosting your blog on your personal server, I would just go with Mixpanel or postHog. They are quite easy to integrate and they enable you to track some more specific events that might be relevant for you.

If you ever decide to host your blog on a cloud provider, Cloudflare provides nice and simple analytics.

Your web host should provide some options such as AWstats based on the server logs. Your host may or may not make it easy to install something else.

I self host plausible. Also interested to check GoAccess once I move away from Netlify to my own VPS

Plausible. I make sure to proxy it so extensions don't block it.

Good enough for me.

Cloudflare Analytics: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/web-analytics/

I've tried goaccess and goatcounter, finally settling for umami.

I analyse the server logs with awk + friends, filtering out obvious bots.

Which Fits You? For simplicity: Use server logs + GoAccess (no code changes). For insights: Self-host Matomo (privacy-first). For a retro feel: Client-side counter (least reliable but fun).

Did you deploy of vercel? they provide analytics as well

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