Self-Hosting Umami Analytics on a VPS

Over the winter holiday break this year, I decided to self-host my web analytics platform for this website using Umami. I’ve been using Plausible Analytics for a few years now. But, I wanted to cut down on costs, take control of my data, and learn more about hosting services on a VPS.

In this post, I’ll share my experience setting up Umami on a VPS and what I’ve learned through this process. If you’d like to self-host Umami yourself, check out this Github repository where I’ve documented my setup in more detail.

Why I switched to Umami

At the time of this writing, the cheapest Plausible Cloud plan costs $90/year (billed annually). This plan includes:

• a data retention period of 3 years
• up to 10,000 page views per month
• analytics tracking for only one site

However, I’d like to retain my data for more than 3 years. Paying $90 per year also feels steep for my relatively low traffic site. I am also planning to create more websites in the future, and don’t want to upgrade my plan so I can have analytics on these new sites.

After researching alternatives, I opted to try Umami as it looked easier to self host compared to the community edition of Plausible.

One tradeoff is that the self-hosted version of Umami uses Postgres for data persistence, which doesn’t scale as well as other analytics services that use ClickHouse, a database optimized for analytics workloads. Given that my traffic volume is quite low, I don’t expect this to be an issue for me in the foreseeable future.

Umami does also have a nicer UI and a few extra features compared to Plausible, which is a bonus.

I briefly considered using the free tier on Umami Cloud, but that only offers 6 months of data retention. The next option would be to pay for the pro plan which costs $20 per month. Hence, I decided to self-host this service myself instead to minimize costs.

Building my self-hosted stack

Aside from minimizing costs, I was also eager to learn how to self-host services for myself on a VPS. This felt intimidating at first, especially the networking aspects. But, it wasn’t too difficult with the help of Claude.

I learned how to provision my VPS, secure it with a firewall (using ufw) and SSH access, and point a subdomain to my server’s IP address using DNS A records. One protip I learned is that you can add an entry like so in your .ssh/config file to simplify SSH access to your server:

Host hetzner-umami
  HostName <YOUR-SERVER-IP-ADDRESS>
  User <your-username>
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/hetzner_ed25519
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  UseKeychain yes

From here, you can simply run ssh hetzner-umami to connect to your server.

The official Umami documentation also provided helpful guidance on setting things up using docker compose.

My final setup is hosted on a Hetzner CAX11 (ARM-based VPS) for €4.45/month, which includes the cost of automatic daily backups. This was surprisingly affordable compared to other VPS providers like Digital Ocean.

On this platform, I’m leveraging docker compose to run Umami together with a Postgres database, and Caddy as a reverse proxy. Caddy here handles HTTPS automatically out of the box via Let’s Encrypt.

This may be overkill but I did also set up monthly backups of my Postgres database to AWS S3 Glacier using a cron job. I’ve been learning about AWS at work so this side project offered an opportunity to get some hands-on experience with S3.

Final Thoughts

This took a few hours on a Saturday afternoon to set up. But, I’m quite happy I spent the time learning how to self-host a web service with the added bonus of saving some money in the long run. I’d definitely recommend giving this a try if you love tinkering and want to learn more about web hosting!