I just checked the stats for september 2nd to september 30th and i am showing 13K unique hits.. but it looks much more on cpanel webalizer.. is it possible that webazlier also counting other sites that links to images on my site? as i've recently seen many many websites linking to images (thumbnail) on my site... pls advise.
Google uses JavaScript to do it's tracking so users with JavaScript turned off will not count in Google Analytics. Also, "bots" as mentioned above doesn't just mean well-known crawlers like GoogleBot and Slurp, it means anything that doesn't support JavaScript. Lastly, any other site hotlinking images from your site will be counted in normal logfile analysers but will be ignored by Google Analytics. Once again, there is no JavaScript in an image so Google can't know about it.
if Google Analytics is as bad as everyone says, what is the best alternative traffic tracking program?
Google Analytics isn't "bad", it is just suited to a different purpose than other types of statistics packages. I use both AWStats and Google because Google tracks things like bounce rate, goal completion and does a very good job of filtering out bots whereas AWStats tracks all the bots, 404 errors, bandwidth usage and any other non standard response codes such as 302, 301, 206 etc... If all else fails, I even resort to grepping through the actual log files if I'm interested in some information that neither service could provide. If you're really interested in this, the O'Reilly book Web Measurement Hacks is indispensable.