The funny thing for me is how much more intuitive this is when you run an actual server, or vps, and how fundamental it is in that context ("Oh crap, bunch of views, they are slowing this laptop down a bunch!") while being so much more involved here.<p>I'm hesitant to generalize past myself, but I really wish someone made me learn the basics on a web server in my own home, where I could reboot it by pulling out a power cord, and transfer files with a usb stick. I would have been so much more able to make thought out trade-offs or attempt grander things.<p>Its straight-forward and free (at the margin) to throw up a password protected site on a server, but daunting in SaaS world. Same story for having a bash script update some page with a gnuplot chart with data obtained via curl/wget, vs. CORS and an API, and a charting library, and json ...<p>I shudder to think of how much time I wasted as I was just learning web anything on solutions that were way too big and complex for my goals at the time - from docker, to lambdas, AWS orbit based nuclear powered whatever to run a clock widget or whatnot. I'm certainly glad I learned those things, and they are scalable and safer and all those good things, but hard to put into context without knowing how one stupid server doing it all by itself would do it.<p>This is all a drawn out way of saying that the cheapest lightsail vps is like 3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the fanciest netlify features right on it, and if you never have done that, you really should. If anything when you do move to netlify, you will really appreciate it on a different level.
Seems like a big miss on their part. I love Netlify and I use them for my personal site. When I got their newsletter email announcing this, the first thought that entered my head was: "Finally! I can take Google Analytics off my site. About time a serious contender took on GA."<p>Unfortunately this costs $108/year more than GA. And while there are a couple of GA alternatives out there, having the financial backing of someone like Netlify makes a big difference. I don't want to think about analytics, I just want to know roughly how much traffic my site is getting, not having to worry about an open source project dying in the next year and having to find yet another replacement.
This makes a ton of sense of for Netlify, and I hope they keep improving on it. If this existed 5 months ago I might not have rolled my own analytics using Netlify functions and Google Spreadsheets^. As it is, $9 per site, and an inability to log client-side routing make it not worth switching from my own, super customizable event-based solution (would have to come up with a new API schema for calling URLs to log specific events / goals).<p>^I wrote about it here: <a href="https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics</a>
This is excellent. The first thing I did was remove GA. It's also incredible that they backfill data.<p>Yes, it costs money. But this is exactly what I want, and Netlify now has a significant incentive not to do anything shady with the data (and by not using cookies or JavaScript, they hamstring any potential ability to sell the data anyway).<p>Good work, I'm glad to be a Netlify customer.
The funny thing about this is tons of developers are using Netlify for SPA's and therefore only that first request will be caught by their edge nodes, all subsequent page views will be missed.
That landing page does not have a single screenshot of what you get for $9 per month. Do you pay the $9 and then find out what the analytics page you're getting is going to look like, and if it's suitable for your website?
At $9/month I think I'll just keep doing what I've been doing so far - throwing Cloudflare in front of the Netlify app and using their free analytics.
I'd purchase this, not because I'm likely to look at it often, but because Netlify provides me a great deal of value that I don't even pay for. It may be more than the cost of Google Analytics, but they've earned my money I think.
I've been hoping that somebody would do this for quite some time. I previously experimented with using CloudFront logs in GoAccess for awhile for my personal blog in order to avoid invasive JavaScript-based tracking, but it was too much trouble to maintain.<p>I really like the idea of the CDN provider offering this as a service that requires no effort and provides a nice interactive dashboard.<p>The pricing on this is unfortunately too much for me to justify using it for my personal site, but I'd happily use it for anything more substantive.
"Sessions are tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying information like IP addresses."<p>Very curious how they are able to do this
Really excited about this, I miss the days of static server-side logs!<p>Pricing is a bit high for my super-low-traffic hobby sites, unfortunately. But I'm glad they're doing this!
I'm curious about comparing my Netlify Analytics numbers to my Google Analytics numbers. I'm seeing a lot more users and page views on Netlify Analytics. I know that GA can be blocked client side, but does GA exclude bot/crawler traffic from stats as well? Or can I assume that the difference between GA and Netlify Analytics numbers are due to adblock / noscript / etc?
Their marketing on this is brilliant. They're capitalizing on the growing adblock/jsblock trend to point out that server side analytics are more accurate.<p>To be fair, back in the day when you had a single web server, analytics was easy. I to miss the days of being able to do a 'tail -f web.log' and watch as your page hit Slashdot...