I’ve replaced the HiStats counter on our home page with some PHP code that tracks visits in a local database.
I did this because the HiStats counter didn’t work when called from a secure page, was implemented in JavaScript and thus didn’t work with browsers that didn’t have JavaScript enabled, and was often slow or unresponsive delaying the loading of our page.
The new counter is implemented in PHP, all the work is done on the server side and so it is completely transparent to the end user and just looks like ordinary HTML code.
It should provide more reliable statistics.