I don't think this is at all in the spirit of hit counters of the past; IIRC they were an img tag that would be dynamically rendered serverside. Static markup

I don't think this is at all in the spirit of hit counters of the past; IIRC they were an img tag that would be dynamically rendered serverside. Static markup » dynamic content. Perhaps a more apples-to-apples comparison would be an img tag that returns an SVG, allowing CSS styling. You can still choose serverless backend, or you can use the tried-and-true apache/nginx with memcache, just like the 90s.