You basically have four real options for real time analytics, and they all either cost money, or are in beta and soon will cost money.
1. Chartbeat. $10/month. Pretty slick, honestly, especially if you only care about "right now".
2. Woopra. Free while in private beta. Getting accepted into the beta typically takes several weeks. Used to see tons of complaints about bugs and inaccurate stats. Seems to be less of an issue these days.
3. Mint. $30 per site. Self hosted / installed. Plugin system to add custom functionality.
4. Clicky. My personal favorite. Over 100,000 sites use it, so it must be at least pretty good, right?
Great job and a great product! I do have one concern which is that the site is very slow and the scripts on our pages take considerable milliseconds to get. on an average twice as much as Google Analytics. Any reason for this? Also, if we make it so that the scripts load after the page has loaded, will this cause any issues?
Unlike Google, we are a small company and don't have millions to throw at hosting data centers all around the world on insanely fast connections. So it is very understandable that our code loads a bit slower. It is certainly a high priorty that our service has as little effect as possible on third party sites, but competing with Google is tough business!
What if you put the scripts on Amazon EC2 (S3 or CloudFront), this will alleviate your server load and put it on Amazon's backbone.
My startup uses Amazon EC2 for hosting etc, and so far I've been very happy. We are not big either, actually we are a two-man team and definitely smaller than even you guys :) But Amazon seems affordable.
Just a thought, but no worries I think the service is still tremendous. Keep up the great job!
Thanks. If you compare us to any other analytics servic that charges money, I think you will find our prices for the amount of page views you can track are amongst the very lowest in the business. In fact, as far as I know, we are the lowest. I invite you to prove me wrong!
1. Chartbeat. $10/month. Pretty slick, honestly, especially if you only care about "right now".
2. Woopra. Free while in private beta. Getting accepted into the beta typically takes several weeks. Used to see tons of complaints about bugs and inaccurate stats. Seems to be less of an issue these days.
3. Mint. $30 per site. Self hosted / installed. Plugin system to add custom functionality.
4. Clicky. My personal favorite. Over 100,000 sites use it, so it must be at least pretty good, right?
Disclaimer: I made Clicky.