Today is a sad day for bloggers and webmasters, especially many from the era of Web 1.0 or from the year around 2000. Emily Lowe, Shirl Leong, Simp Lee, Mazlan Abdul Malik, Tengku Mohd Ali Bustaman and more.
It is a free counter and statistics tracker. It was fashionable to place a meter in your site to show the number of visitors. Many website were hosted on free hosts such as Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. Users soon realise the free servers were shared and cannot provide server traffic logs to generate stats. Sitemeter did more than provide a odometer. It used a few lines of javascript planted on your website to measure and analyse web traffic very comprehensively and in a simple and easy to understand manner.
It outlived all those free hosts except Blogger. A few weeks ago, it announced it Will Be Permanently Retired on July 1st, 2017. It is still humming at the time of writing, maybe, because of timezones. You can imagine the load on their servers when one of the billions of pages loads and pings sitemeter’s servers. It changed its design a few years ago and there was massive rejection. It reverted and maybe that killed the owner’s spirits. Surprisingly there is little outcry or buzz this time as will be a monumental task replacing the codes to a new service provider.
I understand it is a one man show like me and I respect his decision to close down. I must thank him for tracking many of my blogs and websites in the last ten tears or longer. I appreciate and thank him for the service and know it is tough providing a free service. It will be tough finding a replacement . Looking at the final stats today for my main site, it tracked over 46 million unique visitors and nearby 94 million page views. In spite of missing data from long periods of unexplained outages and me changing hosts with long gaps of downtime, it was still an epic journey.
All good things must come to an end. Goodbye, Sitemeter.
If you used it, share with me your experience and let me know your replacement plans.