Comment by mdasen

First: really slick site. I'm not so into the video which takes a while to get to the point, but the site makes it really easy to understand the point of your product (and that's something a lot of sites lack).

I do have some questions/comments and I apologize if they seem a bit rapid-fire.

* When I look at the "Top Pages", there are links. When I click the link, it brings me to that page on your site not a chart of hits for that page. Is that how it's meant to work?

* If I sign up for your service, do my stats become public? https://simpleanalytics.io/apple.com just says "This domain does not have any data yet" (presumably because Apple doesn't have your script installed). But that kinda indicates that any domain with your script installed would show up there. It might just be an error in the messaging, but probably something to fix.

* What's your backend like? I'm mostly curious because analytics at scale isn't an easy problem. Do you write to a log-structured system with high availability (like Kafka) and then process asynchronously? How do you handle making the chart of visitors? Do you roll up the stats periodically?

* Speaking of scale, if I started sending thousands or tens of thousands of requests per second at you, would that be bad? Is this more targeted at small sites?

* What do you do about bots? Bot traffic can be a large source of traffic that throws off numbers.

* How long before numbers are available? It's September 19th, but the last stats on the live demo are September 18th. Is it lagged by a day?

* Do you not want to track user-agents for privacy reasons as well? Seems like a UA doesn't really identify anyone, but it can be useful for determining if you want to support a browser.

* You're not counting anyone that has the "Do Not Track" header. To me, DNT is more about tracking than counting (which is different). Even if you counted my hit, it wouldn't be tracking me if you didn't record information like IP address and there were no cookies.

Kudos for launching something. I think my biggest suggestions would be fixing the live-demo page so it doesn't look like it's leaking other site's data and providing some guidance about limits. It's easy to think that you don't want to put limits on people, but any architecture is made with a certain scale in mind. There's no shame in that. Sometimes what you want is a "let us know if you need more than X" message. At the very least, it lets you prepare. People sometimes use products in ways you wouldn't imagine and ways you didn't intend which the system doesn't handle gracefully.

Good luck with your product!