Source: Dev.to

I Built a Self‑Hostable Plausible + Sentry Alternative in One Day – That Runs on Shared Hosting

I work on projects that run on shared hosting: PHP + MySQL, no root access. It’s a real environment that many developers actually ship to, yet almost no tooling is built for it.

Every analytics or error‑tracking tool I looked at assumed you had at least a VPS, or you were happy paying a SaaS bill every month. Plausible is great, but it’s paid per site, and self‑hosting it means Docker → VPS. Sentry’s free tier is generous—until it isn’t. And there was a hard requirement: no third‑party services touching user data.

So I built one. In a day. It’s called Micrologs.

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What it does

Drop one script tag on your site:

From that point you get:

• Pageviews, sessions, unique visitors, bounce rate
• Country / region / city breakdown (via local MaxMind GeoLite2 — no runtime API calls)
• Device, OS, browser breakdown
• Referrer categorisation — organic, social, email, referral, direct
• UTM campaign tracking
• JavaScript errors auto‑caught (window.onerror and unhandledrejection), grouped by fingerprint
• Manual error tracking from any backend over a single HTTP call
• Audit logging
• Tracked link shortener with click analytics

All of it hits your own database. Nothing leaves your server.

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The constraint that shaped everything

Shared hosting means no Redis, no background workers, no daemons, no WebSockets. You get PHP and MySQL and that’s it. This forced some interesting decisions.

Rate limiting without Redis

Most rate limiters use Redis or a DB table with a timestamp. I went file‑based – an append‑only .req file per request, stored in a per‑IP directory. Counting recent requests = counting files newer than the window.

// Count recent attempts — each file is one request
foreach (glob($userDir . "/*.req") as $file) {
    if ($now - filemtime($file)   

If you’re on shared hosting, running a privacy‑first product, or just tired of paying for tools you could own—give it a try. Issues and pull requests are welcome.

### Roadmap (v2)

- Webhooks for error alerts  
- Redis caching (opt‑in)  
- Async queuing  

If you have thoughts on what matters most, please open an issue.