Eleven days ago we put a privacy-first analytics server next to a site that was already running. No new machine, no managed service, no cookie banner. It took about twenty minutes, it now uses 340 MB of RAM, and its database has grown to 9.5 MB.

It also recorded 96 pageviews in those eleven days, while the web server in front of it logged 2016 successful page responses.

Both numbers are real, both are from the same box, and the gap between them is the most useful thing in this article. Start with the install, because the install is the easy part.

Why self-host this at all

Three reasons, in the order they actually matter.

You already pay for the box. Hosted analytics is priced per month and scales with pageviews, so the bill grows exactly when the site starts working. A container next to an existing site costs whatever 340 MB of RAM costs you, which on a €5.49 server is a rounding error. We sized the rest of the fleet in our Hetzner review and in the VPS comparison .

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