StatCounter is the culmination of 6 years of very hard work, and is different to everything else out there and we're still working on it! The first 4 years were hard work done solely by myself (Aodhan Cullen - The Webmaster) on one dedicated server, and we have seen such explosive growth in the last year that I have expanded this to a team of 5 exceptional people and 30 dedicated servers (and growing!). Now can I ask you, if you dedicated and sacrificed 6 years of your life to something, would you want to keep it a secret, or would you want as many people as possible to use your service?

We are not out to make a quick buck. The reason StatCounter exists is to "help webmasters make decisions, and be more successful online by understanding their visitors". We offer a truly exceptional free service, because we want to help you grow. And as you grow, and as your needs grow, we hope you'll upgrade. We don't impose an upgrade on you. You can use it for free for as long as you like. The only catch is if you start to get over 9,000 pageloads each day you are outside what we can sustain as a free business model and we will then ask you to either remove the code or upgrade. It's as simple as that!

Will you put an ad on my website?

No, no, no ... NO! We do not put an ad on your website. We give YOU the webmaster full control over how you want your website to look. You know what works best for you, we do not! You can have a completely invisible counter, or check out our interface for what is probably the most configurable free hit counter in the world as well as the option to JUST make the counter visible on the homepage, and invisible on subsequent pages. We give you the maximum options we possibly can at all times!

Do you make any money on your free counters or are you a charity?

We run all the free accounts not to make a profit but to break-even each month. When you login to view your website stats we show you a banner ad at the top of your stats page, and in the left menu we run Google Adsense and some text links for hand-picked advertisers that will convert well with our members.

It is a financially tight balancing act, and we have to keep our costs under a very tight rein, but you know we've done it for 6 years and we are going to keep on doing it. But rest assured we don't skimp on servers or performance. We currently have 30 dedicated servers (ever expanding) to share the load across to ensure instant response times. We also maintain a real-time backup, a daily-backup, and an off-site weekly backup of all your data.

This all works great for us because it means we can get all your ideas for how you want to improve the service in the forum. We expand our market to new heights each day, creating a demand for our upgraded services and we get to help our fellow webmasters from all around the world to be more successful, which at the end of the day is what it is all about!

Now the only thing to do is to register for your very own truly free account and start tracking your visitors within the next few minutes!