Hitbox to Webmasters: The Free Ride is Over

WebSideStory Discontinues Popular Site Tracker

[martinibuster]

As of midnight December 31, 2003, WebSideStory will be discontinuing all Free Hitbox Accounts. There hasn't been an announcement, just an email that's going around. Their website [websidestory.com] confirms that the product has been discontinued.

As far as beer-budget analytics goes, they were pretty good.

[keyplyr]

analog is still free :)

[Macro]

I'm particularly peeved with them as I did not get the emails (plural) they claim to have sent. Having been with them for several years I had come to rely on their stats for all my analysis as I could consistently access older stats even after moving hosting companies.

I suppose there's no such thing as a free lunch. However, I don't see it as free. I prominently displayed their ads over several tens of millions of page impressions. I've sent them several tens of thousands of visitors. To discontinue stats history and to not give webmasters a chance to download them first is a dirty, lowdown, trick in my book.

I may have even paid for a professional package but now I am going to avoid anything to do with websitestory. If you do have a pro package look at the small print very carefully and DO NOT assume you'll always have access to your stats.

Don't be a fool like me. Stats are important so download your server logs and use an analytical tool on them. But then YOU will be the one who holds the data that's vital to you.

[RobCamp]

Has anyone upgraded to their pay service after the free service was cut off?

Most importantly, were the stats brought forward, or have they been trashed forever?

It might be worth it to subscribe for even a single month just to get back the stats for my 3 year old multi-million page site. still have the log files, but unzipping 30+ months of files and running web trends against them all would be a lot of effort - I'd probably be willing to for a month or so just to download the old stats and save myself the effort...

[Macro]

were the stats brought forward, or have they been trashed forever?

It might be worth it to subscribe for even a single month just to get back the stats for my 3 year old multi-million page site

That's exactly what I thought but they have scrapped the stats. We should really get nasty behaviour like this some publicity via the media.