I have been using website analytics from Gostats to track my website visitors. I hear a lot about GA but I think that GA does not offer real time reports like Gostats. So what do you recommend?
I would recommend Statcounter as an alternative. It does offer real time tracking with detailed. It has limited on size of log file only but it's FREE. If you want a bigger log file size you may consider using their paid version as optional.
Awstats + Statcounter etc are just that, stats sytems. They are NOT analytics systems. What you need depends on what you are trying to do. If you just want to track visitor volumes a stats system is fine, if you want to do something more meaningful than that for example identify visitor trends that can then help you improve the usability and performance of your site you'll need something like Google Analytics.
I like wordpress stats, but if you arent running their program or dont have a site there then that wouldnt help you...
StatCounter is great (my primary) but offering only last 500 visitors stats, You Can also check HiStats, they are also interesting...
Google Analytics is a good tool plus it's free! I've worked with it for awhile and it has been great as per previous post.
If you piss off Google then they have ALL of your sites clearly linked together. They can penalize everything you slapped an analytics code on. Not to mention that they can see how much traffic you're getting and from where so it will be much easier for them to spot something that violates their guidelines. I don't understand willingly giving up such important data to Google when completely free, self-hosted alternatives exist.