Hi,
I enjoyed reading the thread about High Traffic Piwik Servers. I’m right now in the process of eliminating Google Analytics for some high traffic sites. My main Piwik-Installation runs on a separate domain on a dedicated server, let’s name it mypiwiktracker.com.
Now, here is a tricky question I want to ask for two reasons. Does it make sense to duplicate the Piwik-Installation on the server the website is running? The idea is following. Mimic the Piwik-Installation on myhightrafficwebsite.com, but point to the database server on mypiwiktracker.com.
Here are the reasons:
First, I offload the PHP CPU Load from piwik to the source where the traffic is being made and not to mypiwiktracker.com. Database load will go to mypiwiktracker.com anyways, but there are many things cached.
Second, I do not disclose the mypiwiktracker.com at all. By this I prevent people googling for mypiwiktracker.com and see all my sites. I have no problem at all for the majority of sites, but there are two or three high traffic sites I own with different partners.
The siteid would be of course the same like on mypiwiktracker, where I have an overview of all hits. An alternative is to track separately and then merge the results, but I don’t think that there is a need to do this overhead work. Optimally, my partners would see their statistics on the sites they co-own, but I have only to go to mypiwiktracker for the overview.
One thing that comes into my mind is that Cookie tracking would not work smoothly, since it is being set from the main website and not from mypiwiktracker.com.
Thanks,
Frank