Statcounter
Cost: Free
Download from http://www.statcounter.com
Verdict: Excellent
Install problems
None.
Features
I'm not normally a fan of 'hit counters' but I'd been asked several times by fellow members of Ruislip Bowls Club how many people actually look at our web site. So I thought I would have a look to see if I could find a small discrete page counter that I could add to the site to indicate just how many visitors we were getting.
A search on Google for 'free hit counters' revealed a great number of the usual 'free' offerings that came with garish image based counters littered with unwanted ads but then I came across a little gem from statcounter.com ......
Far more than a simple hit counter, statcounter offers loads of statistics on who is visiting your site, where in the world they are, what they are looking at and much more. It is fully configurable including image based, text based and even invisible counters. Counts can be based on page hits, unique visitors and returning visitors. It's also possible to exclude specific IP addresses or a range of IP addresses so that you don't artificially inflate counts by visiting you own site whilst checking updates etc.
The free version gives you a log quota of 500 entries per project and you can buy extra space starting at 7 euros per month for an additional 1500 entries. And best of all there are NO adverts!
I've gone for a visible text based counter on the home page and invisible counters on sub pages. One thing to note is to insert the code generated ad the configuration stage, at the bottom of your web page. The reason - as I noticed the other day the statcounter website was down - if your statcounter code is at the top of the <body> statement and statcounters web site is down, the page will take ages to load waiting for the connection to statcounter to time out. If you put the code at the bottom of the page, at least most if not all of the page will load first.
Altogether a great utility - thoroughly recommended.