Setting Up a Self-Hosted Analytics Platform with Plausible

Google Analytics is free, but it comes with hidden costs: privacy compliance complexity, slow page loads from tracking scripts, and handing your visitor data to an advertising company. Plausible Analytics solves all three problems with a simple, privacy-first approach that you can self-host.

Why Plausible?

Plausible is a lightweight, open-source analytics platform that does not use cookies and does not collect personal data. It provides the metrics most businesses actually need: page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, visit duration, referral sources, and goal completions. No cross-site tracking, no user profiling, no data sold to third parties.

What It Replaces

Plausible replaces Google Analytics, Matomo (if your current setup is overkill), and Fathom Analytics. For most small businesses, Plausible provides 90 percent of the insight with 10 percent of the complexity.

Key Features

• Cookie-free tracking (no GDPR consent banner needed)
• Real-time dashboard with visitor counts
• Goal and conversion tracking
• Campaign URL tracking (UTM parameters)
• Public API for custom dashboards
• Export data via CSV
• Lightweight script (under 3KB, loads in milliseconds)

Deployment

Plausible runs in Docker with PostgreSQL and a ClickHouse database for analytics storage. For a small business site with under 100,000 monthly visitors, a 1GB RAM VPS handles it easily. VPS1 includes Plausible deployment in our standard stack for businesses that need analytics.