Why do people need things like Google Analytics when they can just self-host? I thought the reason people rather use actual Google Analytics is Google's ability to track specific people across multiple websites and promote websites with Analytics in the search results. But 3-rd party alternatives can't do this anyway or can they?
Self-hosting is a pain for technical teams, let alone the average user of GA who doesn't really want to deal with self hosting at all. My experience with self-hosted solution (Posthog) was really bad and we had to switch to their cloud-based option.
A pain in what sense? I self-host my own stuff and had fewer issues than with services. I also know many people self-hosting their own platforms, and they rarely encounter problems. Stuff usually doesn't break by itself, it breaks when things are changed.
> I thought the reason people rather use actual Google Analytics is Google's ability to track specific people across multiple websites and promote websites with Analytics in the search results.
