Stability and Reliability [9th March 2003]

All old accounts have now been transferred. StatCounter trawled through the old database one last time, and managed to weed out, extract and transfer almost every remaining account, including corrupted ones. The statistics available at the moment are just the tip of the iceberg. We had to get the new system in place immediately, to enable old StatCounter members who lost their accounts to sign up again. StatCounter has accomplished this, and now the next major effort underway is giving the stats a major facelift. So watch this space, as we start to refine and make available more and more stats over the coming weeks. It was a challenging time for StatCounter and its members for the last few months. But from now on things are going to be very different. The new StatCounter system was re-worked from the ground up. It has been in development and testing for the last 2 years now. It was optimized to be incredibly efficient, and all that hard work has paid off handsomely. StatCounter is now performing better than what it could have ever hoped possible. The old system was benchmarked at handling 5 counters a second, while the new system has been benchmarked at handling upwards of 200 counters a second. That's almost 20,000,000 counters a day! The old system would take between 2 - 7 seconds for your counter to load, the new system is currently loading your counter between 0.01 and 0.12 of a second. These are incredible performance gains. Overall the new system is roughly between 2000% and 4000% more efficient! The new system has a number of key advantages to offer you now: Proper admin system This allows StatCounter to immediately target accounts that put too much strain on the system and de-activate them. This usually only happens to about one account every 2 months, but will not effect StatCounter members any more. -There is a better ability to check up and oversee new members. Making sure they install the code correctly. -The database will now easily be kept up to date. So people who no longer want to use the service will be removed, making room for other members. If you're website hasn't received 1 hit and you haven't logged into your account in the last month, then you'll be sent an e-mail reminding you to log in, with instructions on how to paste the code. If after a further 15 days you still haven't received one hit, or logged into your account, then you'll be removed from the database. Maintenance - Daily back-ups of the entire database are made in various locations around the world. - No more than 24 hours of data will ever be lost again. - The database itself, is optimised and cleansed daily - keeping it fast,respsonsive and snappy. Efficiency and Reliability - Your counter displayed on your webpage will now load between 0.01 and 0.12 of a second, which is good news for your visitors! - Viewing your statistics will be far more respsonsive. - Your account is not going to be resetting! So please use the visible counters to help StatCounter out. Revenue Sources - Text Link advertising from StatCounter members is proving to be very popular, and is providing an additional revenue source. Advertisers like the idea of their link appearing on every single page of StatCounter, and getting a free listing in the weekly stats going out to over 10,000 eager e-mail addresses. - Please keep clicking the ValueClick banner ads, as they are truly what's been keeping StatCounter going through the rough times, and are the lifeblood of the whole system. - Still thanks to our great friends at Hosting 365 StatCounter remains hosted on a beast of a server at an affordable price. Which means we're making a very small profit each month and in a position to provide an excellent quality of service to you! This all means that StatCounter will be providing an incredibly reliable, stable and fast service from now on. The proof of course is in the eating, so we'll just have to wait and see how StatCounter does performs, but I believe you'll be pleasantly suprised. I look forward to April and giving the progress of the site. In the meantime, StatCounter is very much so open for business again! We intend to stay open for business this time, we have 15,000 members at the moment and our current database has room for over 30,000 members, so please start recommending StatCounter to your friends again! We need to double our membership! StatCounter is nothing without its members (albeit a higly tweaked and optimised nothing now), we need your support. And keep clicking those ads!