Consolidating one more thing into Cloudflare, analytics

I write this as a sort of marker for myself in the future to see how this will turn out.

I use PanelBear analytics for some of my projects and over the weekend, I logged into check on the analytics when I saw a notice about PanelBear shutting down and joining Cronitor.

I’ve been a paying user for PanelBear for about 2 years, I wasn’t getting a lot of traffic on my projects but still I wanted to support the project so I started paying for it. I was hoping it was a few dollars in support of an alternative analytics platform.

In the past, I’ve tried setting up Fathom on a DigitalOcean box and that was an “OK” experience. Not great but not bad either.

But as I spend less and less time being interested in various new things popping up and trying to spend a good chunk of my time on building my own stuff, I’ve been looking for a quick solution for this.

Analytics aren’t that important to me since the only metric I care about is “are there people coming to my site?” and none of the other fancier stats or features most analytic platforms offer. So I was on Cloudflare when I saw their web analytics feature. This is from the marketing page:

Cloudflare Web Analytics does not use any client-side state, such as cookies or localStorage, to collect usage metrics. We also don’t “fingerprint” individuals via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other data for the purpose of displaying analytics.

For me this is exactly the path I want to go down when it comes to analytics for my sites. I’m not trying to fingerprint users and track them across the web, I just need to know, is someone actually using my website?

So, with literally zero setup, I have analytics on all my domains that use Cloudflare.

Earlier in the post, I said this is like a marker to myself, I’m moving more and more of my web infrastructure to Cloudflare and I’m wondering if this will come back and bite me in the ass at some point.