We’re setting up a self-hosted Ghost v6 instance and looking into the Tinybird integration.
We’ve generated the necessary tokens locally, but we’re unclear on one point:
Does the ghost/traffic-analytics container still need to run on the server, or can we just use the locally generated tokens as environment variables?
Also, what are the resource requirements for this container?
Tinybird is “just” a wrapper around Clickhouse. You will definitely need the ghost/traffic-analytics container to add the business logic to deal with ingesting and reading data to/from Tinybird.
The container can be used for multiple sites though. I am running nearly 800 of them through a single one at the moment.
It runs on about 200-300MB memory and 0.5 vCPU cores. So, super lightweight.
See the container as a proxy between the Ghost site and Tinybird. Ghost forwards events from visitors to the traffic-analytics, which then processes it, and stores it in the connected Tinybird workspace.
On the Ghost Admin, the traffic-analytics container is called to request data from Tinybird.
I think for Pikapods the big question is: do you set up one traffic-analytics container for all customers, or does every Ghost customer get their own traffic-analytics container.
The three managed hosting providers (Ghost(Pro), Synaps Media, Magic Pages) that provide this integration so far all use the former approach: a single service for multiple Ghost sites (same for ActivityPub).
Edit: just saw that Midnight also offers Traffic Analytics now, and I assume they also use the same approach.
Thanks, Jannis! This is exactly what we needed to know.
It’s great to hear the traffic-analytics container is so lightweight and can handle multiple sites. We appreciate the detailed explanation.