Plausible Analytics VPS

Who it suits

Site owners who want simple, cookie-free visitor statistics without sending data to Google. The Community Edition is the free, self-managed release: no support from Plausible, fewer releases, and some features stay in their cloud (the repository's README lists them). Plausible's paid cloud is the managed option.

Which plan

Standard (2 vCPU, 4 GB) is the smallest plan we offer it on. Plausible recommends at least 2 GB of memory, and ClickHouse is the hungry part, so Standard leaves room for traffic peaks and its background work. ClickHouse also needs a CPU with SSE 4.2.

What we install

Plausible CE runs as three containers from the project's community-edition repository: Plausible itself, PostgreSQL for accounts and sites, and ClickHouse for the events. We clone the newest release to /opt/plausible, generate its secret keys in .env and publish Plausible on 127.0.0.1:8000.

From order to ready

1. Server ready. We email you when the server is running, and you can log in with SSH. The installer starts on that same first boot.
2. Installer running. It logs to /var/log/vps9-setup.log; tail -f it to watch.
3. Application ready. /var/lib/vps9-setup.exit appears when the installer has finished, holding 0 if it worked. Plausible is ready when curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/system/health/ready on the server reports postgres and clickhouse as ok.

What you still do

1. From your computer, run ssh -L 8000:127.0.0.1:8000 root@<your IPv4>, open http://localhost:8000 and register your account.
2. Point a domain such as stats.example.com at the server, allow ports 80 and 443 in the panel firewall, and run vps9-https stats.example.com.
3. Log in at https://stats.example.com, add your site and put the script it gives you on your pages.

Exposure and security

Plausible lets whoever registers first, while it has no users, create the first account, so it listens on 127.0.0.1:8000 and you register through an SSH tunnel. vps9-https won't publish it until someone has registered, then puts Caddy on 80 and 443 and sets BASE_URL to your domain. After the first account, registration is by invitation only, Plausible's default.

Backups and upgrades

Updates are yours: read the release notes, then in /opt/plausible fetch the new release tag with git, check it out and run docker compose up -d; major versions can need extra steps. We turn on the operating system's automatic security updates. Back up /opt/plausible/.env and the db-data, event-data and plausible-data volumes off the server. We run the hardware, the network and the first-boot install; after that, Plausible Analytics is yours to run, and we don't manage, update or back it up for you.

Order it from your terminal

$ vps9 servers create --plan standard --image ubuntu-24.04 --app plausible --hostname web-1 --key key_8f2c

{
  "plan": "standard",
  "image": "ubuntu-24.04",
  "hostname": "web-1",
  "app": "plausible"
}