Tech: Reliable web counter - recommendations?

Subject: RE: Tech: Reliable web counter - recommendations?
From: Will Fly
Date: 05 Mar 11 - 10:14 AM

Thank for the recommendations folks. I'm well aware of the limitations of web counters - and I have a good web host that gives me very good stats. Counters are a psychological factor for viewers of the site - and a very crude guide to hits.

Subject: RE: Tech: Reliable web counter - recommendations?
From: treewind
Date: 05 Mar 11 - 08:20 AM

Web counters are almost useless.
If you want to know who's visiting your site, get web hosting that provides proper web stats, i.e. logs the time and IP address of every page fetch and provides tools for displaying some sort of analysis, so you can see which files/pages get the most hits, who the most frequent visitors are (often turns out to be search engines :-/) what country they come from and no. of hits per day/week/month/whatever. It will also give you referer information, and if the referer was a search engine like Google it will tell you what search terms they used. If you can bother to study it carefully, this can be useful.

Even then the data is apt to be misleading. You have no idea how many are viewing your pages via a cache or proxy that gives that a recent copy without touching your actual web server and thus without incrementing your counter or making a log entry.

Put a counter on your page if you like. But don't expect the number to mean anything.

Subject: RE: Tech: Reliable web counter - recommendations?
From: Nick
Date: 05 Mar 11 - 07:20 AM

I've used statcounter too for years and it's merrily recorded 1.4m visitors and 5m+ page views without slowing anything down

Subject: RE: Tech: Reliable web counter - recommendations?
From: GUEST,Ian
Date: 04 Mar 11 - 07:14 PM

Hi Will.
I've used Statcounter for years without a prob.

Ian

Subject: RE: Tech: Reliable web counter - recommendations?
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 04 Mar 11 - 05:58 PM

What does your site run? I'm sure there would be plenty of php scripts for example (plus you could write your own) if your server supports it.

Subject: Tech: Reliable web counter - recommendations?
From: Will Fly
Date: 04 Mar 11 - 05:38 PM

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?