I like web counters on my site home page. Not only does it give some rough information on how much the site's being looked at, but also provides newcomers with some sense that they might be at a useful place.

Trouble is, there's always some irritating problem with the ones provided from some external server. I've just had to remove the last one I've been using as the slowness of the external counter script was slowing down page loading - and that was at around a count of 35,000.

I can detailed stats on the usage of my web site pages from my web host personal admin pages, but a home page counter is handy. Any advice on something simple but reliable?