I’m interested in setting up my site so that I can track the views and things like that, just for personal interest and I was wondering how to do it. It would be cool to know where my site’s being linked from and things like that, but that also seems kind of invasive. Are there any ethics around site analytics that I should be aware of?
personally i don’t (currenly)
what i did use in the past and can recommend is umami! its privacy respecting yet it gives you decent overview of website visits. you’ll have stuff as counties, reffer data (where do your visits came from), anknymized fingerprinting so you have basic device and os data
it doesn’t use cookies or anything and according to the devs you don’t need to put consent banners even if you’re from Europe
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I don’t do it because I’m not convinced there’s any way to do it ethically. By the time you’ve asked a visitor’s consent, they’ve already been to your site and thus been tracked. So I’d rather not do it at all.
But GoatCounter isn’t as egregiously unethical as something like Google Analytics.
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My biggest sites are hosted on cPanel accounts, so I get access to server stats. For the others, I didn’t bother.
While I personally don’t track any statistics right now, I’m still curious which pages actually get visited and which don’t.
I don’t think that is unethically to have some statistics about how your site gets used. But this could be a problem depending on which data gets stored and how those stats get (ab)used by the admin. When having statistic scripts enabled, those can be of course used to unethically track users across your site and even to identify a particular user and what he is interested in.
In general, your web host will actually (more or less always) keep logs including the ip addresses of your site visitors, even when you as the admin of your web space don’t get granted access to those.
The biggest issue: When using the statistic scripts of the big players (e.g. google analytics), they can track users across a whole set of different domains and across their whole journey throughout the web. This is what really should make privacy concerns arise inside everyone of us. Understanding how massive the tracking capatibilities of those companies are across the web has been one of the reasons that made me start to write on my new article series.
Having access to the statistics of a singular domain only IMHO isn’t that bad and can be quite useful to the webmaster. However, even then there is an issue with privacy present depending on how you look at it.
I will have a look at it. Thanks for suggesting 
If you really want to make use of a extensive stats script that you can host yourself, Matomo (correct name?) could be an option for those who want to retain full ownership of the data that has been collected.
I also use goat counter.
Information is already being transferred, what matters is what’s done with that information after the fact. Stuff like goat counter will retain the country location, device used, and path through the site, but it doesn’t tie any of that to a footprint of that specific IP that can then be used, later for sales and marketing which IMO, matters the most, here.
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This is what I have, too. I don’t track anything myself, nor do I use any cookies, but I do get server stats from Hostinger.
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I don’t use GoatCounter myself. I merely suggest it as a less harmful alternative.
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I second Umami. It’s very straight forward, but gives you more than enough stats, and has a decent privacy stance. I self-host a version so the data doesn’t go anywhere, but I’ve heard good things about their hosted plans too.
I didn’t have any tracking for ages, but I find it useful to see where people are coming from, and what they’re looking for, especially if you get linked to from somewhere popular.
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we have free and paid analytics and counters on our resources list, if you want to give any of those a try!
Thanks for the responses, everyone!
I’m still pretty new to the world of self-hosting. Is it hard or very resource intensive? Would it need to be something I get a server for or is it something I could host on like a Raspberry Pi or something?
I just have my server logs. Timestamp, IP, file requested, referer, user-agent. I occasionally poke at it to see what pages are getting looked at, and where people are coming from. A lot of browsers don’t send the referer though, so I get pretty limited information from that.
unrelated but i just noticed my horrible typos there 
i swear I speak fluent english
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I grew up speaking English natively and I still can’t type for shit.
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I also use goatcounter! it’s very simple to set up, and you can use the same account for multiple sites.
For my website i use awstats.
It comes with every controlpanel package (e.g Cpanel, DirectAdmin, HestiaCP etc.)
It gives a lot of interesting statistics, and it is very simple to use.
It runs on your website, and you can put it behind a login (which i did)
i use the analytics that come with bear blog if you subscribe. it seems neat. it is cool to see where people are viewing posts from. that’s about the only interest i have in it. sometimes it is nice to see which of my posts people find interesting. but really i don’t think that will be too useful as i’ve just started using bear blog
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Umami isn’t very resource intensive at all, should run fine on a Raspberry Pi.
It’s not particularly hard to get running, but it does need a database set up along side it. If you’re familiar with (or want to learn) docker then they have a docker-compose file which you can just bring up to get both umami and the database. I found a tutorial that’s more-or-less the same as how I did it. (There’s a load of non-docker tutorials around as well, if you don’t want to dive into that rabbit hole 
)
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I self-host Plausible. I think it’s ethically okay because I log all request anyway for fighting bot traffic. The dashboard for my website is public.
Yeah, the only analytics for my site are the Bearblog ones… I pretty much never look at them, though. I’m on the basic (free) plan so it’s just information like the number of unique visits per day/week.