digitalv - 3:43 pm on Jul 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

A few things to consider on this subject before you discount the current company:

(1) Pricing per hit is similar to cell phone companies pricing per minute. The more traffic the stats company has to log, the higher their costs are due to server capacity (most are running MS SQL 2000 or Oracle) and bandwidth. You might not think a stats company uses much bandwidth, but they do - each page view probably uses about 100 bytes, plus the size of the tracking image. Multiply that by a few million hits a day and you're talking more than 1 GB a day in bandwidth. So obviously their higher-traffic customers are going to pay more than the low ones since they cost them the most.

As for server load, the biggest toll on the server is getting the data for each hit *IN* the database, not looking at it later. Once it's in there, properly indexed, etc. running SELECT queries against the data to give you your stats don't cost (by "cost" I mean CPU / RAM not money) squat incomparison with inserting 100 bytes of data several times per second into a database (most likely with clustered indexes which would slow down an INSERT even further).

It's probably not a single server that handles the INSERTS, so you're probably looking at two or more clustered servers just for that. Then they have to be replcating the data over to one or more additional servers for people to be able to view their stats because there is no way you would be able to run SELECT queries against data that has new records being inserted at a rate of several dozen per second with any decent speed.

(2) Contracts are typical among companies that want to lock you in, so I would be a little worried about this part. I can understand contracts with a cell phone company since they only have a certain amount of phone numbers in the pool and they can't re-use one for so many months after another person stops using it. A web analytics company, however, has no such restrictions. If you leave their service, that FREES UP resources for the next customer so there is no reason they should require a contract unless they're giving you a personal account rep. If they ARE giving you a personal account rep, tell them you don't want one and they may skip the contract. Afterall ... what the heck do you need an account rep for for friggin web stats? You need to get it set up, and you need to be able to call or e-mail tech support if it doesn't work. That's pretty much it.

Before making a decision on this ask for a copy of the contract and read through it if you don't have one already. Look specifically for exit clauses, and if there aren't any tell them the contract is unacceptable. There should also be a bankruptcy and/or acquisition clause in there - if there isn't, demand one. For bankruptcy it basically says that if their company files for chapter 11 or chapter 7 you have the option to walk away because you have no guarantee that they're going to be around (no matter what they say). The acquisition clause basically says that if they are acquired by another company you have the option of terminating the contract because hey, maybe you don't like the other company.

One more thing - tell them you want a 15 or 30 day reversal option. This means that you can cancel within the first 15 or 30 days if you don't like the service and aren't bound to the contract.

If they are unwilling to put those clauses in there, as well as a clause for service availability, then walk.

(3) I don't really know if this is common or not, but I have used 3 different hosted stats companies before and none of them charged an extra fee for additional users.

(4) This is definitely not typical - it doesn't matter how many domains point to a single website. It's one thing where you have 5 domains that are 5 separate sites and you want to track them separately, I HAVE seen that priced higher (although I've also seen "unlimited domains" options for that too), but for the same website there should be no additional charges. I think maybe they misunderstood you and think you are referring to separate websites. If they didn't misunderstand your original inquiry, run :)

(5) I've seen this both ways too, where you pay your base monthly fee in advance and then any overage is billed with the next month's base fee. I've also seen full rear billing where you pay after you receive the service.

Let me know if there is anything else you can think of.