What hit counter you use?

I want a hit counter (free, of course!) that doesn't actually show up on the page. I know theres a free one out there that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about the traffic on your site, but I forgot the name.

What do you all use?

I'm so glad you asked that question! No, really! In most cases, my clients use a stats tool provided by our web host, but I have one client using a free counter from hitboxcentral.com.

In fact, I was going to recommend them to you, but when I went to the site I discovered they no longer offer the free counter, and the existing one will go away soon. I need to get that fixed.

I'm sorry, I haven't used free counters in so long, I'm not sure who else to recommend. But much thanks for allowing me to discover this.

I use my own, it doesn't collect stats though...

I have used countless free counters over the past 4 years, and none
come close to this one:

http://das.reinvigorate.net/

I use it currently, and it's absolutely amazing. I use my server stats as
well, but I like to be able to cross reference.

Wow, that place is incredible Unflux! Thanks for sharing it with me, my search is over.

i was hoping you'd say that. it's great eh?

http://das.reinvigorate.net/ is the best I have seen. I collate my monthly website usage figures from that, it cut and pastes perfectly into Excel with little editing

I recently tried PHP Counter from ekstreme.com, it's very useful!

http://www.ekstreme.com/phplabs/phpcounter.php

If you have a hosting site with PHP + MySQL support I think the best is AWStats... It's very powerful of features!

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

http://www.statcounter.com is good, I use them before I was hosted. AWStats is much better now I have it though.

And if you can find some way to get the raw access logs you can set it up to work at home on your PC using perl and apache server.

I also use das.reinvigorate.net for my stats.

I haven't found anything better. Aside from EXCELLENT tracking services, they also don't make you put an image on your site that advertises them. One of the things I hated about other free tracking services is that they all require you to put up a banner or image of some sort and they use that to records your stats, but they are always so ugly and tacky. With reinvigorate, all you do is add a 1px transparent .gif image, so it's invisible yet still accurately keeps track.

You can't beat it, these people are amazing.


HOWEVER: Reinvigorate is always being worked on, adding new things, fixing other things to make it less server load intensive, so occasionally a portion of the service will go down (for example a while ago their referrer tracking was down for quite a bit while it was recoded, but everything else still worked fine). Small price to pay for such a great service IMO, especially since when it goes down they are trying to make it better.

StatCounter is pretty much the same as that

StatCounter sounds pretty nice.

But i'm a hardcore reinvigorate fan

Wouldn't use either of them now though. AWStats is the best and nobody can argue.

Sure people can argue, those with personal opinions.