I looked around in theforum trying to find some advice on some simple self hosted analytics. Unfortunately I only saw references to Matomo but it seem to bit of an overkill for me.
What I would like to know is the number of visitors to each page and possibly the country. I don’t want to know anything else. I’ve been trying to find something for this but failed. Does anyone have suggestions for where to look?
Come on 
How hard can it be to type that title into Google (or any privacy-oriented search engine, like duckduckgo) and see what happens?
I remember Matomo from times when it was named Piwik (or something like that) and it indeed tends to fill up lots of database space after some months or so. They introduced some kind of report plugin where all data was deleted except the ones to recreate a predefined report. But that is probably still overkilling for you.
Maybe the best, if you really only want to count page views, visitors and countries a simple web server log analysis like AWStats might do the trick. That, of course, depends on if you have these available. If you host on an online service that’s probably not the case.
If you want to pay monthly for a service there are some out there that let you self-host. Like Plausible, but I don’t know if it’s good.
You assume that I haven’t used DuckDuckGo … I have, but still failed to find something simple. Yes, I tried Matomo when it was called Piwik but I had trouble setting it up on my hosting service … and it would be overkill for me. Yep, I would have liked to use AWStats, that would have been ideal for me - I’ve used it before, but unfortunately my hosting provider cancelled support for this earlier this winter 
Some other solutions requires NodeJS which I can’t use where I host, an other option would be Open Web Analytics but it also seem to do much more than I ever would need.
So on top of my current list are Matomo and Open Web Analytics … but I wanted to know if there is something simpler. I basically just want to know if someone ever visits my web site 
Hack it 
Put an image on an image-service online, where their views are counted. make it private, so nobody on that website can load it and then embed on your website. Not sure which service to use that counts and does not embed via iframe (that might dilute the count) though.
addendum: Add it like we did back in the olden days: as 1x1 pixel where it’s not seen on your site.
On second thought: Your top list sounds like you have a PHPable webserver at your hands. I would create a script that logs IP address, time of access and page accessed into a database and a second script that converts that into nice monthly graphics. If you want to log as required by GDPR you replace the last part of the IP address with a 0 before saving.
Is there a reason it has to be self-hosted? because all stats engines will be flawed and the user maybe blocking cookies, blocking scripts, etc
To get unique users (beyond the geocities ‘visitor count’) and things like country - needs code - and then you’re back to scripts and cookies
BTW - there is nothing wrong with self install of Matomo or Open Web Analytics - and then you get all the info you ever dreamed of
and … if you can self install these … you should be able to self install AWstats - depends on your server and the package manager
Hmm, it’s a bit harder than that to install AWStats. Matomo and OWA - you just drop the files into a public available folder and configure the database and run from there. AWStats needs to install binaries, needs access to Crontab and there are quite some distributions that have no package available. I think that’s the reason why so many hosters drop support for it recently.
I think the self-hosted is the part that’s the issue.
I wonder if anyone tried this go-based analytics. GitHub - arp242/goatcounter: Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data.
it sounds like the ‘ideal’ … GoatCounter – open source web analytics
(I) found them are either very complex and designed for advanced users, or far too simplistic. In addition almost all hosted solutions are priced for business users (≥$10/month), making it too expensive for personal/hobby use.
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