For the next month or two, my primary project will be the downloadable version of W3Counter. The current version is available as a hosted subscription service only, while this will be packaged up so it can be unzipped on any shared hosting environment with PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1.

I have a couple reasons to invest this much time rewriting a service that already has thousands of users and active, paying subscribers:

1. The hosted service is already near capacity and offering a downloadable version would help reduce the load, and put off the need for more servers at significant cost.
2. There have been more than a dozen requests for a downloadable version from potential customers offering to pay significant amounts; the market is already there.
3. I would be able to increase my potential customer base as very high traffic sites aren’t allowed to use the hosted service, but would be able to purchase the downloadable version and run it from their server.
4. It’s a good opportunity to implement new features I’ve wanted to create, features that have been requested on the customer forums and by e-mail, and features that weren’t possible for a hosted service (as a single server wouldn’t be able to handle providing those features for thousands of users at once, but could for a handful of websites).
5. I had a new logo professionally designed in July that I haven’t been able to use since it doesn’t match the current design, and redesigning in the current code base is difficult.
6. I’ve learned lessons about running a web statistics service for thousands of users that will benefit me during design this time around.

I plan on keeping a log here, hopefully every few days, of my status on the development of W3Counter 4.0. I might try to find a way to integrate or cross-link between this blog and the blog at the W3Counter site which has gone ignored the past few months as no new features have been added.