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I rewrote https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com from scratch over the past month, and just put it online two days ago. W3Counter was a 12-year-ol

I rewrote https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com from scratch over the past month, and just put it online two days ago. W3Counter was a 12-year-old website offering web stats reports and hit counters with 30-something-thousand users. I ditched all the old code, and the data model, and the business model, and started from scratch. New framework, new way of storing and analyzing stats that scales better and provides more value, and snazzy new design (I hope; design was never my strong suit). The most awesome part for me was throwing out all the old code. Not having to continue developing in and supporting a framework that barely runs in a modern environment. It's going over well so far. The transition was pretty seamless. You can watch the traffic from this comment as it comes in at https://www.w3counter.com/stats/1/visits https://www.w3counter.com/stats/1/visits

SnaKeZ 11y ago
Unable to connect
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
eps 11y ago
Any plans for a self-hosted version?
- dangrossman 11y ago
  No. It wouldn't be very practical, nor very useful. The overlap between people who could self-host it (node.js data collectors, Redis caches, EC2 and Aurora instances, background workers, etc) and whose analytics requirements aren't more advanced than what it offers, is probably nonexistent. There's already a bunch of good self-hosted options out there.
  - eps 11y ago
    Well, fwiw there is no well-designed and useful self-hosted analytics solution out there at the moment. Piwik is useful but not exactly a pinnacle of good design. Pretty, but inconvenient. Mint is well-designed, but functionally it's next to useless for anything outside of basic vanity metrics (I used it extensively, have three licenses). So there is a niche. Though I hear you on not wanting to deal with related support issues.
    - spydum 11y ago
      I wish Google never bought urchin...
darrenkopp 11y ago
Very cool man. I don't want to hijack this and just say that back in the day I used w3counter on my blog before google analytics was a thing and it was awesome and I just want to say thanks for that. Now I have nothing on my blog and work uses google analytics, but it's very cool to see w3counter still in use!
necrodome 11y ago
Comparison between old and business model? Was it worth it to rewrite?
- dangrossman 11y ago
  Old: Free web stats for one low-traffic website per user, in exchange for displaying a counter or badge on their site. Back when hit counters were more common, that wasn't a big ask, and seeing one was the way other people with websites found out about W3Counter. I included ads on the reports, and offered a paid subscription that would let you add multiple websites to the account and not display a counter on your site. All reports were based on a circular log of about 20000 page views per website. New: Web stats reports for as many websites as you have for free, with no requirement to display a counter/badge, and no ads on the reports. It's no longer an ad-supported service, just freemium. Users can now upgrade individual websites in their account to paid plans while others remain free, like Cloudflare (I really like how their subscription model works). The per-website upgrade unlocks extended data retention so you can run reports further into the past (no more tiny logs), real-time dashboards, daily/weekly/monthly e-mail summaries of your stats, and conversion tracking features for businesses that sell things and want to track their advertising/promotions. Was it worth it? From a business standpoint, I don't know if I'll make any more or less money this way. I take big risks that way sometimes. Time will tell. From a personal standpoint, I'll be much happier any time I need to dive into the code to add or change something. Old code needs to die eventually one way or another, just because you can't rely on old language/environment packages forever, lest they pass their EOL and stop getting security updates.
bbcbasic 11y ago
What was the old tech stack, and what did you replace it with?
- dangrossman 11y ago
  Old: Just PHP (Symfony 1.x from 2006ish) and MySQL. New: Node.js for data collection, Redis for data caching, Amazon Aurora for data storage, Cloudflare/ELB/EC2 for frontend serving, and the web app rebuilt in modern PHP (with Silex).

SnaKeZ 11y ago

Unable to connect

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

eps 11y ago

Any plans for a self-hosted version?

dangrossman 11y ago
No. It wouldn't be very practical, nor very useful. The overlap between people who could self-host it (node.js data collectors, Redis caches, EC2 and Aurora instances, background workers, etc) and whose analytics requirements aren't more advanced than what it offers, is probably nonexistent. There's already a bunch of good self-hosted options out there.
- eps 11y ago
  Well, fwiw there is no well-designed and useful self-hosted analytics solution out there at the moment. Piwik is useful but not exactly a pinnacle of good design. Pretty, but inconvenient. Mint is well-designed, but functionally it's next to useless for anything outside of basic vanity metrics (I used it extensively, have three licenses). So there is a niche. Though I hear you on not wanting to deal with related support issues.
  - spydum 11y ago
    I wish Google never bought urchin...

darrenkopp 11y ago

Very cool man. I don't want to hijack this and just say that back in the day I used w3counter on my blog before google analytics was a thing and it was awesome and I just want to say thanks for that. Now I have nothing on my blog and work uses google analytics, but it's very cool to see w3counter still in use!

necrodome 11y ago

Comparison between old and business model? Was it worth it to rewrite?

dangrossman 11y ago
Old: Free web stats for one low-traffic website per user, in exchange for displaying a counter or badge on their site. Back when hit counters were more common, that wasn't a big ask, and seeing one was the way other people with websites found out about W3Counter. I included ads on the reports, and offered a paid subscription that would let you add multiple websites to the account and not display a counter on your site. All reports were based on a circular log of about 20000 page views per website. New: Web stats reports for as many websites as you have for free, with no requirement to display a counter/badge, and no ads on the reports. It's no longer an ad-supported service, just freemium. Users can now upgrade individual websites in their account to paid plans while others remain free, like Cloudflare (I really like how their subscription model works). The per-website upgrade unlocks extended data retention so you can run reports further into the past (no more tiny logs), real-time dashboards, daily/weekly/monthly e-mail summaries of your stats, and conversion tracking features for businesses that sell things and want to track their advertising/promotions. Was it worth it? From a business standpoint, I don't know if I'll make any more or less money this way. I take big risks that way sometimes. Time will tell. From a personal standpoint, I'll be much happier any time I need to dive into the code to add or change something. Old code needs to die eventually one way or another, just because you can't rely on old language/environment packages forever, lest they pass their EOL and stop getting security updates.

bbcbasic 11y ago

What was the old tech stack, and what did you replace it with?

dangrossman 11y ago
Old: Just PHP (Symfony 1.x from 2006ish) and MySQL. New: Node.js for data collection, Redis for data caching, Amazon Aurora for data storage, Cloudflare/ELB/EC2 for frontend serving, and the web app rebuilt in modern PHP (with Silex).