As previously announced, Dev4Press and all other mine websites, have ditched Google Analytics and replaced it with Matomo On-Premise Analytics that I host, set to no longer use tracking cookies, and keep all the analytics data anonymous and in-house.
On February 27, Dev4Press was switched to the new analytics, and at the same time the Privacy Policy and Cookies Policy have been updated to reflect the change, and the Cookie Consent has been removed from the website because we no longer set any cookies that fall under the identifiable information cookies. The only cookies stored by the Dev4Press are when you are logged in, if you browse Dev4Press with no login, no cookies are used and nothing identifiable from your visit logged.
Matomo On-Premise Analytics software is hosted on the same server as the Dev4Press website, it uses our dev4press.net domain, and it is used for all my websites including Debug.Press, Millan.dev, TiniART.net, BBHelp.club. Analytics is set to anonymize IP, doesn’t use tracking cookies and in general, all the identifiable information is anonymized. The raw visits data is stored for up to 1 year, and aggregated visitations are kept after that period.
Over the past few days, I have been evaluating the data gathered by the new Analytics, and I am very satisfied by what kind of information is logged, and how easier is to analyze it compared to Google Analytics. It is true that because tracking cookies are not used, some details from visits might be lost, but that is a small price to pay for the fact that Dev4Press is not tracking visitors anymore, that third-party services are not tracking users via Dev4Press, and it is still able to have enough insights into the website traffic.
As for the website’s overall performance, the new Analytics JavaScript is slightly smaller than Google Analytics, but it makes only one call to the analytics server, and our website performance has improved slightly from this switch. As for the server performance, the Matomo is PHP software, and it is using very little of the server resources so far, for 8 websites tracked. I expect this will vary over time, but I don’t expect any issues for the next few years at least. I still don’t know how much space will the system requirements over time, but, if needed, the server can be expanded with additional space later.
