So much to do ... so little time (anyone want email reports?) [12th November 2003]

I have the flu at the moment, but we are definitely on schedule to become the most popular web tracker and counter for webmasters and website owners this world over. We have you - the members to thank for that. If you didn’t use our services, then there wouldn't be much point to it all. Now would there? We had a couple of members complaining during the difficult re-launching stage – saying things like ‘we had destroyed a good counter service’. Well I’m afraid this was a temporary short term evil for long term gain. I personally spent 6 months consulting with a number of professionals about the best way to allow StatCounter to scale to allow for 1,000’s of millions of hits a day. But of course we are only going to do this if it is sustainable and commerciably viable. I’m sure you can appreciate that this was no easy undertaking that we did not take lightly. The old StatCounter service became maxed out on its one dedicated server during September. It couldn’t take any more members. This meant we had to take the regrettable decision of stopping new registrations, in order to ensure a consistent and speedy service was maintained for our current members. The new system now however is operating across an incredible 4 dedicated services with a real-time back up of all your data, and a daily 24 hour back up stored off-site. As demand increases now, with the new system we’ll simply be able to add more servers to cope with demand. This is definitely part of our plan. We hope to scale out to 100’s of dedicated services – ensuring that your counter will always be kept loading in an instant and your stats are easily accessible. The new system however isn’t even nearly finished, but the crucial fundamentals to allow the service to grow into the future are in place. We’ll be continuing to work on improving the system based on your feedback. We’ve made leaps and strides over the last few weeks already. But it will be at least 6 months before we release our “advanced tracking” and “ebusiness tracking” services. We’ll be concentrating on getting the basic tracking working first, and allowing member to increase the log size of their basic tracking. We want to aim for mass market appeal for increasing your log size. So we’ll be looking at the logistics of charging something like $2 a month to get a log quota of 1,000. There’s so much more to say but this is already long enough. I’d like to thank you for your support. Be sure to check out our active forum for all the details about the service. The one element that I am working on at the moment is “configuring email reports”. What sort of interface would people like to see to be able to configure email reports? I’m thinking something along the lines of click the email icon for your project. A list of different email reports for standard tracking are available. You can pick an email report from that list, then add users to this report. Schedule how often you want it go out, and then submit. Would you like to be able to just have a to: or cc: field so you can just add in email addresses as well, without needing to add users? Post in this topic and let me know.