The whole point of using a solution like google analytics which is free (to a certain extend) is to not have to hire a professional. There is no way a single s

The whole point of using a solution like google analytics which is free (to a certain extend) is to not have to hire a professional. There is no way a single sysadmin (how good he think he is) could write the code required for the analytics of a high volume web site (eg. ranked in the top 1000). Also, without analytics right from the start, I can guarantee you, your web site will never grow, at least certainly not to a high volume web site. And here the thing that do happen when your web site have a high volume (you know, in real life and not on a fantasy island), even if you reduce your analytics sampling to 10% your web site traffic can still be bigger than the maximum allowed "for free". So you decide "let's write our own solution" and you assign it to a team of about 5 devs and it take them a good 6 months to finally be able to track data, and then your pointy hairy boss realise he has no nice visual way to read this data (because he want basically the same thing as google analytics). so tell me again why I/we should not use ga again ?