Simple Analytics

Van Rossum started Simple Analytics after refusing to paste Google Analytics on his own sites. His Code Story interview is explicit: previous products died because he kept learning new frameworks — this time he used only Node.js, Postgres, and Chart.js.

The MVP took about three months. He launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News with a cookieless, privacy-first pitch — finished on time because boring tools did not block shipping.

His “failure” post documents the production layout: a Queue server collects pageviews from embed scripts; the Main server is encrypted and only boots with a password; a Testing server runs acceptance checks; an External server handles custom domains and SSL — separation of concerns without Kubernetes.

They moved servers to Iceland (1984 hosting) for privacy, then adjusted CDN strategy when embed latency ticked up. Postgres carried the MVP; Elasticsearch arrived later when drill-down features needed faster aggregations.

Van Rossum hired Elasticsearch expertise when Postgres aggregations across five tables became painful — a deliberate graduation, not day-one over-engineering. Monthly updates describe fully encrypted API servers scaling horizontally with customers.

Simple Analytics stays off containers and orchestration by choice: multiple dedicated servers in the Netherlands, Cloudflare for DNS/CDN, transparency posts about outages and architecture. The product sells trust, not infra novelty.