Site Counter

January 10, 2005 2:26 AM

Looking for a Site Counter for an NGO's website. They're prepared to pay. The host can't/won't do counts.

Ideally, it wouldn't involve putting a tracker on every page and we would get a weekly/monthly report as a word or pdf file.
posted by quarsan to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Well, if you're paying, something like http://extreme-dm.com/tracking/?npt might be what you're after but...

If you're paying, then, unless I'm misunderstanding various things, I'd switch hosts pretty quickly to one that will give you access to your logfiles. You can then run these through any one of a number of free or pay softwares (I use WebTrends) and you'll get as many facts, figures and stats as you'll ever need.
posted by Hartster at 4:02 AM on January 10, 2005

What hartster said. From what you describe, you don't want a counter ("this page has been loaded [img] times"), you want a log analyzer like WebTrends, Webalizer, or Analog produces. All of those depend on access to the webserver logs, which your host ought to provide. They all tend to output HTML reports, but HTML->PDF isn't impossible if that's an absolute requirement.
posted by mendel at 5:10 AM on January 10, 2005

thanks for that, but we're not changing hosts, and the hosts won't or can't offer any help. outputting to html would be fine.

i find it odd that the hosts - and this is on a business server - don't provide a thing
posted by quarsan at 7:06 AM on January 10, 2005

Have you tried poking around your directories on the host server? You might find a logfiles directory in there. I'm really surprised they're being such pricks about giving you log files.
posted by mkultra at 8:13 AM on January 10, 2005

shaun inman's shortstats is pretty decent
http://www.shauninman.com/mentary/past/shortstat_maintenance.php

ideally logfile analysis is the way to go, such as awstats, but since it seems you dont have access...

if you're willing to divulge who the host is, some poking could be done to see if there is manner of getting to the info that the host claims is not available
posted by angry jonny at 10:45 AM on January 10, 2005