I’m a big fan of holiday advent calendars where you open up one of the doors each day in December and get some sort of little prize as you count down the days to your favorite winter-time holiday. In fact, last year I asked my wife to get me one… and she did! She filled it up with all kinds of chocolatey goodies and I was a happy days-until-my-favorite-winter-time-holiday-counter-downer all through most of the month of December. So, sort of like that, but not every day and not as chocolatey and not really actually holiday related, we have something new for you! … Slick integration with the Chartbeat real-time analytics service into the DreamHost Web Control Panel. Chartbeat provides real-time information about the visitors to your website, including what they are doing, which pages they are visiting, and what parts of the pages they are looking at. It also goes beyond that and incorporates information from other parts of the web like twitter so you can gain even more insight into where visitors are coming from and what they’re saying about you. I’ve been using Chartbeat for this blog for the past month or so and it’s actually made boring old web stats fun and interesting again. It’s a unique look at your visitors that I had never seen before. The iPhone app with push notifications is slick, too.
Chartbeat is a paid service that you can order straight from the DreamHost Web Control Panel, and there’s a 30 day free trial so you can give it a go and see what you think. The Chartbeat team would love to hear comments from our users so give it a try even if you don’t think you’d end up using it. You may be surprised to find you use it more than you thought you would!
December 14th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
very good!!
December 14th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Saw this on techcrunch today. Good job guys.
December 14th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
I saw that when I was logged into the WebPanel earlier today. It is really sweet. I am trying to see if that is something I could implement for the non-profit website you guys host for me.
December 14th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
What is the advantage of this over Google Analytics?
December 14th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
This might be more interesting if it wasn’t more expensive than a plain hosting account. :\
Maybe if they had a free version that was a lot more stripped down (no alerts or downtime monitoring) it’d be fun to play with, but not for that price.
December 14th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Damn, I don’t care that much for my visitors, there is no way I would pay that much for someone to tell me how many people are visiting my site and stuff.
I’ll stick with Google for this.
December 14th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
I would love to get this, but I must agree with everyone else. I really don’t need it, but I would get it for the “cool” factor. The cool factor isn’t worth $10 to $38 to me.
December 14th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Thanks for becoming more like the horrible host called GoDaddy. Lots of features, but the best ones cost more.
December 14th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
@Dreamhost
Does this imply that PHP will be upgraded to the current version (v5.3.1) then?
December 15th, 2009 at 7:33 am
How does this imply an upgrade in PHP? If anything, they need to upgrade to at least the latest 5.2 version (5.2.11 I think, 5.3.1 might be in that unsure to upgrade period still)
December 15th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Wow. Google Apps, some analytics service… you’re like GoDaddy except instead of building it yourself you’re “partnering” to cram a bunch of ads in your control panel.
Please add an option to turn off all of these advertisements. I don’t want to waste my time and bandwith on this crap. I’m paying you for hosting, I’m not paying you to give me commercials. What’s next, an interstitial ad for Amazon’s SimpleDB when I try to go to the MySQL config page?
December 15th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Chartbeat actually complements Google Analytics. The two provide some overlapping information but for the most part they aim to give you different insights.
We thought this service was cool enough that we wanted to make it easy for our users to get it while also providing a level of integration that’s not possible with any other hosting service.
December 15th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
When it comes to stats I would rather have a years worth of daily log files instead of the 30-day limit… please consider this DH…
December 16th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
@Chris O’Byrne – It’s real-time.
I think for many people paying $10/mo for this is a waste, if you really need down-to-the-second stats then it might be for you. For me, Analytics is fine.
December 22nd, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I installed Piwik + ClickHeat to track visitors. It’s not as slick (yet) but it doesn’t cost me a cent and doesn’t hand over data to some third party. Now what I could really use for Dreamhost is external monitoring…
December 27th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
WOW.
Too expensive.
Most of Scripts today do what this does.
Magento shows all visitors, Joomla too.
And DH should make it cheaper.
You are selling for the same price as them and I bet you guys get some.
:D
January 16th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
This strikes me as a fairly significant violation of trust, spying on visitors in ways that they could not reasonably expect. Also, silent and unasked download-allowance usage is not cool. On both counts, I’m disappointed in DreamHost.