Performancing Metrics, a great free service for bloggers to analyse how people are reading their stuff, is currently too expensive to maintain, and Performancing are considering taking it open source:

The biggest pull on company resources is Metrics. Our pro-grade blog analytics service. It currently has around 16,000 registered blogs using it, and though it’s cool, it’s not producing.

There is no other blog analytics program out there that can scale as Metrics was built to. I remember MeasureMap showing signs of buckling under just a few hundred users but it takes a lot of bandwidth, and 3 very high grade servers to run the current system.

At this stage, and in the current climate of “free” everything, I’m neither prepared to put ads on it nor charge for it — What’d I’d like to do, is to give Metrics to the community by making it Open Source, or sell Metrics to a company with more financial resources that could continue to develop it, and benefit from the usebase.

Good news I guess if it works out, though I like the current set up myself. What other free stats packages, other than Google Analytics, are there – just in case Metrics disappears?

[tags]performancing, metrics, open source[/tags]