Every website needs three things: hosting, a contact form, and analytics. I knew this from day one when I started building ZeroDeploy. And I knew I didn’t want to manage three accounts, three dashboards, and three subscriptions to get them.
So I built all three in.
I already wrote about why forms belong in the hosting platform. Analytics is the same story — maybe even more so, because the gap between what most sites need and what analytics products sell you is enormous.
Google Analytics was great — in 2006
It was great back then. There wasn’t much awareness about privacy, and honestly, people didn’t care. The options were basic server-side analytics or GA on the client side, and GA was the best thing available.
But even then, the dashboard was too complicated. I remember staring at panels and reports trying to find a simple number — how many people visited my site this week? It was buried under conversion funnels, audience segments, real-time maps, and a dozen metrics I didn’t understand and didn’t need.
That was 20 years ago. Today it’s worse. GA4 is more powerful and harder to use than ever. And now we know the cost: you’re feeding Google every click your visitors make. Every page they view, every device they use, how long they stay, where they came from. All of that goes into Google’s ad targeting machine.
For a portfolio site? For a side project? That’s a bad trade.
The privacy tax
The awareness caught up. GDPR happened. And suddenly every website needs a cookie banner — that annoying popup you click through 30 times a day without reading.
I hate cookie banners. I don’t want them on my sites, and I’ll do anything to avoid them.
But if you use Google Analytics, you need one. GA sets cookies, tracks users across sessions, and collects data that falls squarely under GDPR’s definition of personal data. No cookie banner means you’re not compliant. Compliant means an ugly banner on every page.
The privacy-respecting alternatives — Plausible, Fathom, Umami — solve this well. No cookies, no personal data, no banner needed. They’re good products. But they’re also another account to manage, another dashboard to check, another subscription to pay for.
Plausible is $9/month. Fathom is $14/month. For a personal site or a side project, that’s often more than the hosting costs. And the question I kept asking myself: is it really worth it? For a portfolio, a landing page, a project that gets 200 visitors a month — do I really want to pay for and manage a separate analytics service?
For most sites, the honest answer is no. You skip it. The site goes live without analytics, and you never find out if anyone visits. You shipped something and you’re staring at a blank wall.
Analytics is a feature, not a product
Here’s the thing: for the vast majority of websites, analytics is a solved problem. You need to know how many people visited, which pages they looked at, where they came from, and maybe what country they’re in. That’s it.
That doesn’t require a dedicated product. It doesn’t require a separate account, a JavaScript snippet, a tag manager, or a monthly subscription. It’s a feature — one that should be part of your hosting, the same way HTTPS is part of your hosting.
If you’re doing advanced stuff — marketing attribution, conversion funnels across ad campaigns, A/B testing with statistical significance, cohort analysis — then yes, use a full analytics product. Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom — they exist for a reason and they do it well.
But for a portfolio, a blog, a landing page, a documentation site, a side project? You don’t need any of that. You need basic numbers, and you need them without adding another tool to your stack.
No setup, no cookies, no consent banner
ZeroDeploy automatically injects a tiny analytics script (~1KB) into your pages — similar to how Plausible and Fathom work, but you never have to add it yourself. No copying snippet codes into your HTML, no tag manager, no configuration. Deploy your site and tracking is already active.
The script is privacy-focused: no cookies, no personal data, no cross-site tracking. Nothing that triggers a consent banner.
You deploy your site and analytics is just there. Open the dashboard, see your traffic. Visitors, pageviews, top pages, referrers, countries, devices — the numbers you actually check.
That’s the advantage of building analytics into the hosting layer. The platform already knows about your site. It already sees every request. Adding tracking is a natural extension, not a separate integration. Every site gets real analytics — including free tier — without any additional setup or cost.
What you see and what we don’t store
You get: visitors, pageviews, top pages, referrers, countries, browsers, devices, operating systems. If you want more, you can set up custom events and goals — track button clicks, form submissions, or signup conversions to see what’s actually working. Funnels show you where visitors drop off in a multi-step flow, so you know exactly where to focus.
What we don’t store: personal data, IP addresses (hashed for uniqueness then discarded), or anything that requires cookies or consent. No fingerprinting, no cross-site tracking.
There’s one tradeoff worth knowing about. If a visitor comes to your site today and comes back tomorrow, they’re counted as two visitors by default. Slightly less precise “unique visitor” numbers — in exchange for not needing a cookie banner and not storing anyone’s personal data.
For a portfolio or a landing page, that tradeoff is obvious. For an e-commerce site optimizing a checkout funnel across repeat visits, maybe not — and that’s fine. Use a dedicated tool for that.
The real cost of “free” analytics
Google Analytics is free. But you pay with your visitors’ data and a cookie banner on every page.
Privacy-focused analytics tools cost $9-14/month. Great products, but that’s another vendor in your stack.
Self-hosted options like Umami are free but require a server, a database, and maintenance.
Or you just skip analytics entirely because the overhead isn’t worth it for a small site.
None of these are good options for the majority of websites. The best analytics experience for a portfolio, a blog, or a side project is one you don’t have to think about. Deploy your site, open the dashboard when you’re curious. That’s it.
Analytics belongs in the hosting layer
Your hosting platform already sees every request. It already knows which pages get traffic, where visitors come from, and what devices they use. Packaging that data into a dashboard is a feature, not a product.
If you need advanced marketing analytics, use a dedicated tool — Plausible and Fathom are both excellent. But if you just want to know whether anyone is visiting your site without managing another account, ZeroDeploy’s built-in analytics has you covered. No setup, no cookies, no consent banners. Deploy your site and it’s already on.
See how it works or try it free — no credit card required.