Web page counter

[Phil Steinmeyer]

I want to add a web page counter to my company site. On my blog site, I've got two free ones - Sitemeter and Extreme tracking. I've noticed that once in a while (maybe 2% of the time), my blog hangs up for 5+ seconds while trying to pull the icon for Sitemeter.

But I wonder if that's just a slowdown to get the actual logo graphic for these things (which is only a requirement for the free version), or if the part where your web page pings their server (to actually count the hits) can cause page slowdown too.

Has anyone used the paid versions of either of these (at $4-7/month), and if so, do they ever slow your site down or cause other problems?

[jankoM]

I think that pause is not caused by the image downloading from there but from their server being slow at even starting to respond. So it could be image and/or counter javascript. Same thing was happening to me with some banner add company.

btw. I use StatCounter.com (also free) and I newer noticed any slowdowns and I was looking for them because I expected them. They have option of invisible tracker too (I have it on bravekidgames.com), so no img to download. Everything is free and stats are nice but you are limited at your log storage capacity.

regards,
Janko M.

[ErikH2000]

I don't understand why one would use a page counter on another server. Convenience, I guess. Why not host one on your own site? There's lots of free ones available and they aren't that hard to install.

-Erik

[soniCron]

I don't understand why one would use a page counter on another server. Convenience, I guess. Why not host one on your own site? There's lots of free ones available and they aren't that hard to install. I agree. I use TraceWatch (http://www.tracewatch.com/). It's worth a look, especially for the dynamic page traversal analysis.

[jankoM]

Convenience, I guess.
Well probably you gues right. You register, copy/paste js code and start watching stats. With selfhosting I have to think a little php4 / php5, auto_globals=On/off, mysql...
If I knew for tracewatch at the time, I would maybe rather go with that. But for long term stats, is usually something like webalizer (http://bravekidgames.com/logs/) on servers anyway. But that tracewatch really looks good, thanks soniCron.

Janko M.

[Greg Squire]

I'm assuming by "web page counter" you mean a private web stats tracking application and not one of those cheesy "# of hits" counters on a site's main page that were so prevalent on the web years ago. ;) I think most people finally caught on that those can do more harm than good as they could make your site look like a "ghost town". (i.e. "We've had 0000014 visitors since 1/1/2003")

As for website tracking, I was planning on using PHPMyVisites (http://www.phpmyvisites.net/) (a free open source stats tracker [orginially in French]), but tracewatch (above) is looking pretty good too. I'll have to compare.

[soniCron]

As for website tracking, I was planning on using PHPMyVisites (http://www.phpmyvisites.net/) (a free open source stats tracker [orginially in French]), but tracewatch (above) is looking pretty good too. I'll have to compare. For what it's worth, I use both (PHPMyVisites and TraceWatch), and I wouldn't have it any other way. They each offer things in their own way. If I want to see how traffic moves on my site, or get an accurate as possible view of the number of visitors, I check out TraceWatch. If I want to see where these users are coming from or what features their browser supports, I use PHPMyVisites. I don't think you could really replace one with the other.