Matomo
Hosting

If a customer asks me what they should use for website analytics in 2026, my answer is almost always Matomo. I've been recommending it for years, and the case has only got stronger as Google Analytics 4 alienated swathes of its old user base, as cookie banner compliance got messier, and as data sovereignty became a real concern for UK businesses post-Brexit. Matomo solves all three of those problems by sitting on your own server, under your own control, with a clear story you can tell your visitors and your DPO.

From a hosting point of view, Matomo is well-behaved. It runs on the same PHP ' . PHP_VERSION_LATEST . ' and MySQL 8 stack we use for everything else. The database can grow if you have heavy traffic, which is the main thing to watch, but for the typical small-business website with tens of thousands of monthly visitors, a Matomo install fits comfortably on a shared plan. We have customers running Matomo on £5.99 plans alongside their main WordPress site without breaking a sweat.

"Self-hosted Matomo is the analytics tool I use myself, recommend to my customers, and trust to give me numbers that aren't sampled, deferred or quietly reshaped by a third party. It's not glamorous. It's just honest."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

The privacy story is the headline reason most of our customers choose Matomo, but the data quality is the reason they stay. Google Analytics 4 made an architectural decision to sample heavy traffic and to defer some report generation. Matomo doesn't. You see the actual numbers, in real time, without sampling thresholds or magic blending. For a marketing team trying to make decisions, that matters more than the dashboard polish that GA4 has in its favour.

Configuration is the part new users sometimes underestimate. Matomo has a lot of settings, and the defaults are sensible but not optimal for every site. I usually walk customers through three key choices: whether to enable JavaScript tracking, server-side log import, or both; whether to anonymise the last byte or two of visitor IPs (we recommend yes for GDPR); and whether to use cookie-less tracking (which works well for low-friction privacy compliance but reduces some user-journey analysis). Once those are decided, the system gets out of your way.

The cookie banner question is where Matomo really earns its keep. Because the data stays on your server, and because Matomo can be configured to track without persistent cookies, you can often legitimately offer a "we use privacy-respecting analytics, no cookies, no tracking" message instead of the standard intrusive consent popup. We always advise getting your own legal sign-off on this rather than taking my word, but the precedent set by the French CNIL ruling on Matomo is well-established and many UK sites have followed similar patterns.

Migration from Google Analytics is something we get asked about a lot. Matomo can import historical Google Analytics data via its Google Analytics Importer plugin, which pulls reports through the GA API and stores them as if they were native Matomo data. The historical record is approximate (sampling effects on the GA side don't go away just because you're importing) but for trend continuity it works well. From day one of the cutover, you have native Matomo data that's clean.

For anyone running heavier traffic (a million pageviews a month and up), I'd suggest stepping up to a cloud server from £9.99/mo. The MySQL database starts to want more memory at that scale, and the report generation cron benefits from dedicated CPU. Below that volume, shared hosting is fine.