Mint is nice as long as your site isn't going to be crazy high traffic. Since every time you load a page it takes PHP actions and makes DB calls, if you get a lot of traffic (and we're talking several thousand page views a day, for the most part) it will start to create a fairly high level of server load.

I'm making my own AJAXian tracking tool specifically for the stats I want to have.

Thank you for pointing the cross reference :)
I did make a search forum on "Tracking tool" and "traffic" I think. Oooops.

Google Analytics. I have subscribed for my personal website but have not included the JavaScript yet. I did it but the Terms and Conditions are a wee bit too scary for me o_O I don't mind for my personal website but this new website, will be more for a business so not sure I wanna go with Google.

Any comment on their Terms and Conditions? Or am I the only one who find them scary. Especially the part who says that if your website is too popular you will have to pay (unless you are a good AdWords client o_O) Or that you have to agree that google analytic is the best tool (something like that!!!)

Alixe

I've come accross this service...

http://performancing.com/

I've used their blogging tool which is cool... anybody try their stats service?

I have to agree with egon google analytics is the best free tracking tool out there. The one that came with my hosting package was too basic so I went looking around. I tried a few before settling on statcounter which I used for almost 8 months. Statcounter has a good range of tracking options and does in depth details of users, but has two drawbacks.

- the free accounts are limited to full details on only the last 100 visitors
- poor UI design makes it clunky and slow

Google Analytics on the other hand, is simply outstanding. It has a great feature set, allows you to dig down deep, has adword integration, can set adword conversion goals and monitor adword usage, and plenty of other stuff that I'll probably never use. One of the features I like most are the graphs and charts, stat counter has them, but google's are cleaner. Not only are they easy to use/read, but every portion of the UI has the google feel. Oh, and google isn't limited to 100 users, and is totally free.

Regarding Alixe's comment, google's hit count is cut off at 5 million page views per month. I had the digg effect hit my website earlier this year and the most I got was 19,000 per day for a month. That was just under 600,000 pageviews. Could I receive more hits per month? Sure, but is it likely? Probably not. Unless you have an immensely popular website with lots of return traffic, you really don't have to worry about the 5 million view limit.

Regardless of which tool we tell you to use, your best bet is to install a couple of different trackers on your website and see which one works for you. I've had statcounter for eight months, and google analytics for about two. They are both still on my site, but statcounter will probably be coming off soon.

For my low-traffic site I use activemeter.com and love it
I use google analytics at work for our corporate site and really don't like it, you can't customize the stats that you see and the navigation is really complicated and cumbersome

I did find the TOA a bit scary, but I don't think they will act on it. I think they put all that in their for their protection