I've been self-hosting Matomo for about a year and I'm starting to wonder if the maintenance overhead is worth it for my use case.
Between PHP updates, database optimization, security patches, and the occasional report processing freeze, I'm spending 1-2 hours a month just keeping it running. And that's for a handful of small sites that get maybe 50K pageviews combined.
The thing that surprised me most: out of the box, Matomo uses first-party cookies with a 13-month lifetime and processes IP addresses. You have to explicitly configure cookieless tracking. So the "more private because self-hosted" argument doesn't hold unless you actually change the dfaults.
For anyone else who's been through this: did you stick with self-hosted or switch to a cloud tool? I've been looking at Plausible (which also has a self-hosted community edition), Umami, and some of the lighter SaaS options like Fathom and Fairlytics.
Curious what the trade-off looks like for others. The appeal of self-hosting is real, but so is the time cost.
Tips for r/selfhosted: This sub values honest discussion, not promotion. The post frames it as a genuine question. Don't link to fairlytics.dev in the post, only mention it if someone asks directly in the comments.
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