Recently I've been trying to keep track of who shows up at the site and how they get here. I've gone through a number of different hosted stat counter options, not many of which are good.

The first I used was eXTReMe Tracking which is a pretty decent service for free. They don't hold a limit over your head and, as I said, it's free. The downside is a visual link on your page by which anyone can view your stats. In some ways, I like to let people watch the stats but in other ways, I don't. This was dumped after a fairly long time for a newer service brought to my attention by Joel Blain on the TypePad Forums. That service was the data archiving services of Re_Invigorate. While Re_Invigorate was quite pretty, it lacked real functionality and some of the features of the other stat services. It went the way of the dodo for me soon enough and StatCounter took it's place. StatCounter was nice and pretty and quite functional too but it only remembered your last 100 hits in detail and this got annoying after a while. I only recently moved to a stat service I've never heard of before this. It's called PowerPhlogger and I think that the free version is hosted on their servers... the pay version is self-hostable I guess. That confused me at first. It says that it only hosts 10,000 hits for the free version but that is a lot more than 100. I think I'll stick with this for a while and I'll update with my later impressions.