Sitemeter Suicide?

“Did SiteMeter Commit Suicide?”, Stacy McCain asks:

As of right now, it’s dead. Donald Douglas at American Power and Doug Ross at Director Blue both report that the best, easiest-to-use traffic analytics site failed to renew its domain registration, an error that would require a special kind of stupidity.

Let’s all say a prayer that they can get it fixed, because without SiteMeter, I feel like I’m blogging blind.

People talk about other analytic software as being technologically superior, but here’s the thing: SiteMeter allowed sites to make their traffic data public in real-time. This permitted apples-to-apples comparisons between sites, which was especially helpful information for entry-level bloggers trying to figure out how to grow their traffic.

Sitemeter must have rolling server repair issues, as my counter was out yesterday and — knock on Formica — appears to be back, but now others are experiencing issues today. Also, as with their mammoth outage last year, their technical support seems to have fallen into a black hole; while the product still works (most of the time), Sitemeter reps never respond, beyond an automated ticket, to outage issues. Needless to say, this is not good customer support.