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4) The counter companies usually make money by indirect means such as advertising and selling marketing research information. This makes them very vulnerable to
whims of advertisers (and stock market). You could find yourself replacing all of your remotely loaded scripts more often than you would like simply due to company turnover (and quite a few of these companies have gone belly up in year 2001).
There are not that many advantages to using these scripts. In fact, only real reason that makes sense is simply that you have no choice because you do not have access to server logs. Another reason is if you really want a hit counter displayed on your pages.
If you must use a remotely hosted counter script, be sure and look at them all before settling on one. Why? Since code is embedded within all of your pages, it can be quite a pain to change later. So take time to find a script which gives you all of data that you need to manage your site.
Some remotely hosted scripts are listed below.
BeSeen http://www.beseen.com/hitcounter/index.html Simple counter with a variety of styles.
Bravenet Web Services http://www.bravenet.com/ The counters come in various sizes and colors, and increment when new visitors come to your web page. When you click on your counter it will take you to several pages of useful statistics.
Extreme Tracking http://www.extreme-dm.com racking/ Very advanced tracking service. You will be able to tell exactly what your visitors are doing if you add this service to your site. Some of features include: real-time reporting and extensive referrer tracking.
Fast Counter http://www.bcentral.com/fastcounter/ This service from bCentral gives you a simple, fast counter. Nothing fancy, just a variety of styles. Not much reporting capabilities.
FreeStats http://www.freestats.com/ A very good tracking service with lots of features. With Freestats you will be able to know exactly what your visitors are doing on your web site, how long they've been there and where they came from.
HitBox http://www.hitbox.com/ By far best tracking service on internet. If you want to find out exactly what your visitors are doing, where they came from and how long they stayed, this service is for you. Note: this service does require a bit more setup than most.
HitMatic http://www.hitmatic.com/ A good counter with lots of statistics.
SiteMeter http://www.sitemeter.com/ Site Meter is a free, fast, and easy way to add a web counter to your web page. Not only does it display number of visitors to your web site, it also keeps statistics on number of visits each hour and each day.
WebStat http://www.webstat.net/more.html Reasonably good statistics package. Easy to install, easy to use.
WebTracker http://www.fxweb.com racker/ Implementing a WebTracker on your page lets you count visitors to your page. You gain informative data on what browser they are using, operating system they are running, and can even tell if they are a return visitor! Find out what days of week are hot at your site, and find out what time of day visitors come to your site. Note: limited to sites with 500 hits per day or less.
Additional Information
Constantly collect and analyze statistics http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/Statistics.htm You MUST collect and analyze statistics about your web site to determine what is working and what is not.
Watching Your Visitors http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/maintwatching.htm If you are a webmaster, then you need to know what your visitors are doing on your web site.
Web Bugs http://www.internet-tips.net/Security/webbugs.htm Web bugs are little graphic images inserted into web pages, emails and other web-aware documents to allow companies to gather information about you without your knowledge.
