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How To Host And Install 66Analytics (Tutorial)

By James LePage
 on January 16, 2021
Last modified on January 7th, 2022

How To Host And Install 66Analytics (Tutorial)

By James LePage
 on January 16, 2021
Last modified on January 7th, 2022

In this tutorial we are going to talk about how to install 66Analytics on your webhost. This is going to cover everything from unzipping the file to choosing the best host for this platform to configuration once installed. It's actually a fairly simple process, and by following this tutorial it should be made even easier.

Be sure to read through the documentation before doing anything to have a solid understanding of 66Analytics. You can also take a look at our feature review of the product.

Please note, we are not the company behind 66Analytics, just a happy customer. This is not an official support document. Any and all questions and support requests must go to AltumCode, the company that makes this product.

For a low one time purchase price, unlimited analytics, heatmap and session recordings, and complete data ownership, 66Analytics was a no brainer purchase.

Once you have purchased 66Analytics for yourself, it's time to install it on a web host. once installed, you will then go ahead and configure the necessary settings, create a user account, and install the pixel tracker on your respective websites. This guide is only going to talk about how to host and install 66Analytics. Once installed, it's up to you to configure it how you need .

The Best Host For 66Analytics

The officially recommended cloud hosting platform for 66Analytics is Digtial Ocean, but as long as your host supports the following requirements, you should be able to install it anywhere:

As of Jan, 2021

But, if you aren't that technical, configuring a Digtial Ocean server for a production piece of software like 66Analytics could be pretty daunting. Instead, we highly recommend using the Cloudways platform, and that's the route that we took. Cloudways is a server management platform that sits on top of underlying cloud infrastructure, including Google Cloud, Digtial Ocean, Vultur, and more. There's a nice 3 day free trial, no CC, for you to test it out.

With Cloudways, you can easily create a new Digtial Ocean server for as low as $10 per month, and manage everything including databases and packages from an easy to use back end interface. We use this web hosting platform for all of our client WordPress websites, as well as PHP applications like 66Analytics. There’s also built in bot protection, easy domain management, and more.

You can even get 30% off by using our code “ISOTROPIC”.

However, if you seek to opt for the raw Digtial Ocean server and install and manage the packages yourself, you can also use this link to get $100 in free Digtial Ocean credits. There's no catch, other than when you create an account, we will get $25 in credits (I believe).

The remainder of this tutorial will discuss how to install 66Analytics on a Digtial Ocean host partitioned and managed by Cloudways. There’s a 3 day free trial, so you can test everything out at no cost to you.

Step 1: Create A Server

The first step is creating a Digtial Ocean server on Cloudways. When you sign up for your three day free trial on the platform, you will be prompted to create a server. Choose Digtial Ocean, and set the application details to be a PHP stack custom application, give it a name, give your server a name, and select 1 GB for your server ram size.

This is the lowest cost plan which comes in at $10 per month, which can always be scaled as usage increases. With the Cloudways platform, you can easily get visual representations of your CPU and ram usage via live-update graphs, to understand when it’s a good time to upgrade. For our testing purposes, this 1 Gig of ram is more than enough – with it comes 25gbs of SSD block storage.

However, if you are looking to make use of the heat map and session recordings, you may want to consider a larger amount of memory upfront, as these are processes that are very resource intensive. Whatever the case is, you can always scale up as need be. But, if you're going to use these features, consider the 2 GB plan at $22/mo (% discount with code “ISOTROPIC”).

Step 2: Create A PHP Application

If you are following the standard flow that a brand new Cloudways user would take, you would be prompted to create a PHP application when partitioning your new server. If you already have a Cloudways account and already have a Digtial Ocean server that you want to host 66Analytics on, you would simply create a new PHP stack application. The default Cloudways PHP stack application is a great way to host many popular open source software offerings.

It comes with a standard package manager, NPM, and a bunch of other features that developers love. There's also direct integration to GitHub if need be. We are not going to use any of these features, as everything for 66Analytics is already installed and can easily be managed from the back end. See Step 4 For more information regarding this.

Another major benefit that comes with Cloudways is that when you create a PHP application, a my SQL database is automatically generated, as is the user and login information. Therefore, we can skip the step of creating a database – it’s already there, all we need to do is copy the information during the installation step of 66Analytics.

Step 3: Connect Your Domain

Before we actually begin the installation setup for 66Analytics on our new Digtial Ocean Cloudways host, we want to connect the domain as this to do this, simply point your domain via an A record to the IP address of your Cloudways Digtial Ocean server. Then, within the PHP application settings, go to the domain management tab, and just enter the domain there.

After propagation, your domain will point directly to the cloud PHP application, which will soon be replaced with 66Analytics. You can also easily set up a SSL Certificate (free via LetsEncrypt) via the “SSL Certificate” tab, and force all traffic to HTTPS, which is good for SEO and Security.

Of course, if you are just testing it out and this is not the final production location, you can keep the standard development domain. Also, if you are using this for personal use, you don't even need to purchase an connect a domain as this one will work just fine.

Step 4: Update/Check Required Packages

The 66Analytics platform has several dependencies that it requires to run properly. With Cloudways, it's easy to manage and update these dependencies. 66Analytics has the current package/server requirements:

At the time of publication, the only required update to the default settings that are applied to our Cloudways Digtial Ocean server and PHP is updating PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4.

This is a server wide setting, and not application specific, meaning that you need to go to the overall server settings and update the PHP package there.

Step 5: Upload Your Files (FTP)

So now our server and individual application are configured, it's time to upload the 66 analytic product files to Cloudways via FTP, and install it. You're past the most difficult part of creating the server, application, and confirming that all packages are up to date.

the first thing to do is create a FTP log into your application period this is done on the main page of the Cloudways PHP application, all you need to do is enter a username and password.

Then, connect to the sever via SFTP – we use WINSCP for this.

At this point, you definitely should have purchased and downloaded the 66Analytics personal license or extended license from Gumroad. Once you purchase, you get access to a zip file download, which you should put on your desktop.

Unzip this file, and locate the folder titled /products.

Then, using the SFTP window that is open, simply drag and drop every file from the /products folder to the main folder of your application (public_html).

Just drag and drop, overwriting the existing index.php file.

Step 6: Set Proper Permissions

Give the 777 CHMOD permissions to config.php, and recursively apply the same to the “uploads” folder.

Step 7: Configure 66Analytics (connect to DB & server)

This is the main installation step where you enter your database information, domain information, and more.

And you should navigate to the installation directory:

If you haven’t pointed a production domain: phpstack-serverid-appid.cloudwaysapps.com/install

If you have pointed and configured a production domain: https://yourdomain.com/install

You may get a warning from the browser stating that the HTTPS SSL certificate is improperly configured. This isn't an issue, and just go and bypass this notice. It will be resolved when you specify the production domain.

You should get to a page that looks like this:

Ensure that all the requirements are met, which should be the case if using Cloudways and following this tutorial:

Add your license key, and verify that the domain is correct:

Now enter your database details, which can be simply copied and pasted from the Cloudways platform. You can find them on the main page of the application access panel.

For Cloudways, the host remails “localhost”.

Click the continue button. And, congratulations you have just installed 66Analytics on your Cloudways Digital Ocean server.

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Roger
Roger
1 year ago

Hi friends, anyone can explain how i can use or set goals snippet? How this code is inserted in the web page to measure?
Custom Goals​Custom goals will require some extra code implemented to the tracked website, which is specified when you create a new goal from the dashboard.

A custom goal is mainly used for when you want to track a specific event that happens on your website, which can't be tracked with the pageview method.

Some examples of where custom goals will shine are:

  • Tracking clicks on external links
  • Tracking more advanced form submissions
  • Tracking clicks on specific parts of your pages

Here is what a javascript snippet would look like for goal tracking:

66analytics.goal('my-goal');​

Article By
James LePage
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James LePage is the founder of Isotropic, a WordPress education company and digital agency. He is also the founder of CodeWP.ai, a venture backed startup bringing AI to WordPress creators.
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