Help with some basic Getting Started questions please

General questions
1

Hello folks! I was directed here from the Matomo WordPress forum. Matomo On-Premise seems to be a good solution for a situation with a tricky staging / production environment, where we are unable to deselect particular tables when copying environments. I have read the documentation here:
https://matomo.org/faq/on-premise/installing-matomo/
I still have a few questions, please, to help me get started…

Can the On-Premise installation be on a completely different server, different hosting company, than the site we collect data from? In other words…

A) Is this kind of set-up possible:

  • Hosted at analytics.ourcompany.com (on server x with Acme webhosting company)
  • Collecting data from www.ourclient.com (on server y with a different webhosting company)

B) And how about this:

  • Hosted at analytics.ourcompany.com (on server x with Acme webhosting company)
  • Collecting data from www.ourclient.com (on server y with a different webhosting company)
  • Also collecting data from www.anotherclient.com (on server z with yet a different webhosting company)

We can use the same installation of On-Premise to monitor more than one website, correct? It seems like it, from the documentation, but I’d just like to be sure :wink:

C) Is a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on analytics.ourcompany.com OK? On each site we are tracking too?

Thanks so much for your answers!

2

Hi @hommealone
If I am not wrong, you can define the tracking server. I never used the Matomo WP plugin, but in other cases this is possible.
In case of different domains, just be careful with the cross origin requests (if for example content security policies are set for example)

3

Thanks, Philippe. I would not be using the WP plugin version; I’d be using On-Premise.

Regarding your caveat about cross origin requests: should I be concerned about content security policies on the domain being monitored, or on the domain where the Matomo software is installed? We control both, so I can check and change the policy on either… what policy is it that would cause an issue?

4

Hi @hommealone

On the pages being monitored. This is an HTTP header (or <meta> HTML tag) that is applied on the page

  • Default policy (default-src),
  • script-src if tracking scripts are not hosted on the same server as the page,
  • connect-src for tracking requests
5

Thanks again, @heurteph-ei Philippe! Very helpful. I appreciate it!

Regarding my original question then, both my A and B scenarios should work, in theory, correct? We can collect data from more than one remote site? (As long as there are no problems with content security issues, as you’ve explained.)