Show HN: Counter – Simple and free web analytics
One of the saddest trends in web dev over the past decade or so is the shift away from hosting on a server you have access to and moving over to something opaque like Netlify or Vercel. Pretty much all of the data you can get from a JS-plugin based third party like Counter is sitting in your Apache/nginx/IIS log files if you host your site on a server you control, but without the need for stuffing yet another piece of client side code that has no benefit to the user in to the HTML.<p>It's not likely to change so I'm just yelling at a cloud right now, but website stats is one of the biggest losses in modern web dev so it bugs me. Maybe more than it should. For what it's worth, Counter looks to be a much better option than Google-"here's 200KB of glacially slow JS because screw users"-Tag-Manager.