I've had a free Sitemeter counter for nearly two years now, and though it has its wonky moments it's always worked. For some bizarre reason, yesterday the counter at the bottom of this blog became inaccessible to me - if you click on it, you get a message that says "Access to this account is currently blocked. Contact the system administrator." I've no idea what this means. View access to my stats is unrestricted, but the account name and password I used to set this up still seem to work, though I can't see anything when I do log in.
I've sent a message to the Sitemeter webmaster and am awaiting a reply. I know you get what you pay for, but this is still annoying. Most likely, in another day or so I'll just create a new counter and start it out at approximately the total I think I was at before this happened. Since the counter code is on each archive page, that means a complete rebuild. Sigh.
I'm contemplating adding a different counter for comparison and backup purposes. Anyone have experience with Extreme Tracking? Are there any other decent choices? Thanks.
Posted by Charles Kuffner on February 11, 2004 to Administrivia | TrackBackI have sitemeter and it does get hinky from time to time. I still use it on my site, but I also added this one, and like it much better.
Posted by: Alan W on February 11, 2004 8:22 AMI recommend www.totalchoicehosting.com
Their rates are fab, and they offer free stats.
Well, it's already May, so I'm not sure if Charles will come back here to post. I'm very interested to know, Charles, if you had a reply from Sitemeter's owner, David Smith (he runs Sitemeter).
I had a very bad experience with Sitemeter, as follows:
I have been using their services for close to 4 years, during the past two years I used the upgraded services, gives more stats options and bigger logs, plus the option of an invisible counter.
Now I have never used the option of an invisible counter, as I am interested that visitors to my site will be able to see the number of visitors we have received. What I was using is a counter styly offered by Sitemeter to all FREE account, of the number of visitors against a transparent background.
When my last annual upgrade expired, I received an email from them alerting me to the 'oversight' of not renewing my account (why 'oversight'?? It is at my descretion of I want to renew or not). At the same time, my counterstyle was replaced with a logo-type style instead of the transparent style I was using (which is available to all FREE accounts).
I wrote about 3 emails to Mr. David Smith ([email protected]), which remained unanswered. The only reaction was that following my last email, instead of replying, he blocked access to my account (meaning also visitors to the site are not counted any more).
I find it totally bizarre and of course unacceptable that this is the way Sitemeter treats people who pay for their services.
In any case this obliged me to remove the Sitemeter counter from all my pages (over 600 pages!!! - you can imagine the work involved).
So I do not recommend anyone using Sitemeter (even though their statistics are gread) because of the unprofessional (to say the least) service they offer, certainly don't ever consider paying them for their services or you might be in for a surprise.
I am now using http://www.statcounter.com/ plus my own stats generated from server logs. The disadvantage of Statcounter is that is keeps the detailed stats (referrer, search words etc) only for the last 100 hits (unless you upgrade).