In this page I'll try to explain you why I think WebCounter is
such a revolutionary Java application.
The other counters available on the web can be roughly classified
in two base groups: first- and second-generation.
First-generation counters simply record the number of hits. They
are very easy to manage, and typically do not require web
administrator privileges to be installed. Unfortunately, they are
often inadequate.
First of all, they can be easily fooled into recording
unrealistically high hit counts by just accessing the page over
and over again from a same host. Some more recent versions offer
partial remedy to this problem by detecting two immediately
consecutive accesses from the same host; still, it only takes two
machines alternating access requests to circumvent this check.
Secondly, there are circumstances when you are interested only in
hits from a certain category of sites. For example, if you sell
educational software, you may be interested in hits from hosts in
the ".edu" domain. On the other end, if you sell only
to companies, you will want to filter out the ".edu"
domain from your hits count.
To solve these problems, enter the second-generation counters.
These are usually not very easy to install, and often require
administrator privileges on the web server to be installed; on
the other hand, they provide information about the hosts
accessing the page, and therefore can recognize multiple (but
possibly not consecutive) hits from the same host and deal with
them adequately.
Unfortunately, even second-generation web counters sometime do
not provide sufficient information. In this age of avid
web-surfing, you need to know if the user who accessed your page
stayed on long enough to read its content, or just passed trough.
Second-generation web counters cannot provide that information,
as they simply can record the timestamp of the access.
What makes WebCounter such an invaluable tool in analyzing the
traffic on your web site is that it is able to record both the
time when a user entered your pages and the time he/she exited.
Moreover, it stores this information on the database of your
choice, so it fits right in, whatever is the information
management system of your company. Finally, it's absolutely free.
What more could you ask from a web counter?