Why self-host Plausible on a VPS
Plausible was designed to measure your audience without tracking individuals: no cookies, no personal data, so generally no consent banner. The version hosted by the vendor is billed by page-view volume. When self-hosted on a VPS, you pay for the server once, your data stays with you, and you track as many sites as your machine allows.
The concrete benefits of a self-hosted Plausible
- No cookies or personal data: easier GDPR compliance, often with no banner.
- Your audience statistics stay on your infrastructure.
- Lightweight, readable dashboard, and a tiny tracking script.
- Fixed cost independent of the number of monthly page views.
- Unlimited sites on a single instance, within the limits of the VPS resources.
Hardware and software requirements
Plausible ships with ClickHouse, which is more demanding than a simple SQL database. Count on 2 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM minimum, 4 GB for sustained traffic. Plan for 10 GB of disk that will grow with the history. On the software side: Docker and Docker Compose, a subdomain (e.g. plausible.your-domain.com) pointing to the VPS, and port 443 open.
Deploy Plausible CE with Docker and HTTPS
Prepare the VPS and Docker
Over SSH, update the system and install Docker via curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh.
Get community-edition
Clone the official repository: git clone https://github.com/plausible/community-edition plausible && cd plausible. It provides the Compose file and the reference configuration.
Configure plausible-conf.env
Fill in BASE_URL=https://plausible.your-domain.com, a generated SECRET_KEY_BASE (openssl rand -base64 48), and the SMTP parameters if you want e-mail invitations.
Start the stack
Run docker compose up -d. Plausible starts with PostgreSQL (metadata) and ClickHouse (events). Follow the logs until you see the web service ready on port 8000.
Configure the reverse proxy
With Caddy: plausible.your-domain.com { reverse_proxy localhost:8000 }. Caddy manages the Let's Encrypt TLS automatically.
Create the account and add the script
Open the URL, create the first administrator account, add your site and insert the tracking snippet into the <head> of your pages.
ClickHouse writes heavily to disk: monitor free space and back up both PostgreSQL and the ClickHouse volume so you lose neither the configuration nor the event history.
The official documentation
For advanced configuration and options specific to the tool, refer to the official Plausible Analytics documentation. This guide covers going live on a VPS; the vendor's documentation remains the reference for fine-tuning, major updates and specific use cases.
