I run a number of websites that account for just a few thousand page views per day in total. Many of these websites are simple hobby sites I created for myself, friends, or family over the years, such as NBAWebLog.com and ReadyToBurst.com. Many of these sites are hosted with different web hosting providers. I am interested to learn what tools you use to manage small, hobby sites. (By 'manage' I mean to track site usage, monitor the site's health, and so on.) I've been using the following two free tools that I'd recommend to others:
- StatCounter.com, for tracking/viewing reports on site traffic across the various websites, and
- SiteUpTime.com, for keeping dibs on the site/web hosts's overall uptime/health.
Both services are free only in limited ways: StatCounter.com is free for sites that get less than 9,500 page views per day; SiteUpTime.com is free for monitoring one site.
StatCounter.com is pretty easy to setup, you simply create a new 'project' and provide the URL of your site. They then give you a cookie to place on each page in your site. Once you've added this cookie to your site and some visitors have stopped by, you can go back to StatCounter.com and view reports on your site's traffic. The reports are nothing fancy, and from what I see you cannot view reports for multiple projects at once (i.e., compare traffic patterns for site X vs. taffic patterns for site Y), but for the price I'm very pleased with the service.
I'm interested in learning about more 'must-have' resources for managing/running small, non-mission-critical websites. If you have any tools you find invaluable for this means, be sure to share them by posting a comment.