So as mentioned yesterday, given our recent and dramatic spike in traffic, I’ve been looking for some more flexible stats packages to better digest just what the hell is going on with our site. In the course of my meanderings, I ran across several mentions of a newly released package called Mint.
While in some respects it appears to be pretty indistinguishable from other stats packages, it has two features that are pretty sweet as far as I’m concerned: the ability to serve up various results via RSS, and more importantly, a pluggable architecture that allows for the extension of functionality through add-on modules, called Peppers.
Pretty much on the basis of those two features alone I was sold (I expect the referrer spam filtering, which Statcounter provides but 1and1’s tools do not), and I created a new MySQL database on our 1and1 box and ran through the very simple compatability app Mint offers, with the results coming back all systems go.
Just before I went to purchase Mint, though, I ran across this warning on 1and1’s MySQL administration page that I’d never really noticed before:
“Please note that the MySQL database may not under any circumstances be used for log evaluation operations, ad clicks, chat systems, banner rotations, or similar applications putting extreme loads on the database.”
Javascript loads for each page view, with our new traffic levels? Seems like that might be a bit of an “extreme load.” Which is disappointing, because that leaves Statcounter as my only real option, given that any logging application is seemingly against the rules. I like Statcounter, but for the traffic we’re now seeing, it’s simply not economical. If I had more availability, this might be where I switch us off 1and1’s infrastructure over to something more developer friendly like Textdrive, but as things are that’ll have to wait. Meantime, you might give Mint a look if you have free reign on your box.
