From Woopra to Google Analytics, and everything in between, there’s a lot out there for website traffic analysis. Because of the nature of a new project I’m working on, I was looking for a script I could host myself locally and have some flexibility with. Within a couple seconds of Google searching, I came across Piwik which pretty much solves my needs. Although I’ve only loaded it on my test server, I’ve set it up to track multiple websites to get a better feel.

So far, Piwik seems to be pretty thorough. Not to the point of hosted services, but it’s still in beta (0.5.4) and is really fast. Not only does it work well, it’s carries a minimalistic design which is easy to navigate and allows the user to jump right in. Since it is self hosted, the software suggests a minimum of 128mb RAM allowance to operate for “medium to high traffic websites.” While I have it installed on a dedicated server, I think it could work on most shared hosted environments (if your website can run on a shared host).

The software allows you to configure multiple sites, as I mentioned before. This means that you can use one instance to manage traffic from multiple sources, without having to rely on third party solutions.

Finally, the software is free and open source. Not only is the price right, however because it is open source, there is a lot of potential for the script to grow from out side development.

Oh, and it installed in less then 5 minutes.