Analytics you control.
WHY SELF-HOST
Data stays on your own hosting rather than with a third party, which matters for some privacy positions and some regulatory situations.
No sampling, and complete control over retention.
WHAT IT COSTS
Analytics data accumulates rapidly. A site with meaningful traffic generates a large database within months.
Processing reports is resource-intensive, particularly the scheduled archiving.
INSTALLING
Softaculous or manually. Needs a database and a supported PHP version.
THE CRON REQUIREMENT
Report archiving should run from cron rather than being triggered on browsing. Without it, opening a report processes data live and is extremely slow.
This is the most common cause of Matomo being unusably slow.
RESOURCE AWARENESS
On shared hosting, a busy site's analytics can consume a meaningful share of your allowance. Watch the resource graphs after installing.
ALTERNATIVES
Hosted analytics removes all of this. Self-host where you have a genuine reason rather than by default.
