Here’s a great stats service to track hits to your site

After hearing good things about StatCounter from friends who’ve used it, I decided to give it a try. I liked it so much after one day, that I decided to shell out $9/month to see stats on many of my sites.

What’s to like:

• A decent, no-nag free option!
• Easy to set up… stats visible 2 minutes after I signed up, and literally 2 seconds after I put the javascript on my first site and visited a page.
• Admirable support. When companies have an active and supported forum, that’s a huge plus in my book… it says “This company honestly cares about its users and their concerns.”
• Ability to have tracking invisible even on the free version!
• Lots of useful stats. I was particularly impressed that I can see the full path of any user who visits one of my sites.

What would make this even better:

• Alerts! I’d love to get an e-mail, or — better yet — an SMS or IM when someone from [domain] visits my site, when someone visits
  a specific page, when there’s a huge traffic spike, when I don’t get a hit within 10 minutes (site may be down), etc.
• More trending reports. Which pages have surged in popularity? Am I getting a lot more folks from Canada than two months ago? Has the average visit length increased a lot since earlier this year?

Anyway, I encourage you to try out this useful service. Let me know what think!