I really like W3Counter's reports, but for me it seems to be very slow. Whenever I login, try to pull a report, anything, it just is not very fast to load. Anyone else have this issue? I am considering going Pro but not until this issue seems to right itself. Furthermore, the $9 per month seems high for the type of reports that are given. Any thoughts?
Not enough people upgrade to pay for more hardware to make the site faster. It already uses several very expensive servers to track all 22,000 websites in real-time. I tried $4.95/month as a price point and no more people signed up than at $9.95. I'd love to do more, but I can't bleed hundreds of dollars a month, and I don't want to close it to free accounts either.
I completely understand the predicament Dan and wasn't meaning for anyone to run a business at a loss. I guess for myself I'm just trying to justify upgrading, but having trouble justifying if I can't access my stats anyway. Just a suggestion, but perhaps you might offer a non-live real time stat option at a lower cost on different servers. Personally, I'm not interested in what people are doing that very second on my site, but would like a nice alternative to Analytics at a reasonable price. Just some thoughts, what you've created is very nice, but doesn't seem to fit what I'm looking for exactly.
It wouldn't make a difference at this point. Hundreds of page views per second have to be recorded to track all the visits across all the sites. The transaction load from recording the data far outweighs the people logging in to W3Counter to view reports, so reducing that cost wouldn't free up any meaningful capacity. From a business standpoint I should've closed W3Counter several years ago, I run it because I love it. And most of the time it's perfect, there's just little I can do when things slow down a bit during high traffic times.
Dan, and I'm not trying to be negative here, but I guess I'm less likely to sign up for premium now. Obviously actual paying customers could care less about the business model, assuming that the money side is worked out. Good luck and if you ever upgrade your servers again and get a stable reports system, drop me a PM.