Today a former colleague of mine emailed me with a few questions. To answer them I have decided to put together this blog post as I believe the answers might help others as well.
Virtual Dedicated Server
His first question focused on my mention of Virtual Dedicated Server. To summarize I have recently leased a VDS from GoDaddy.com. While this is higher in price then simply using shared hosting it does give me a lot more control and options of what I use the server for.
To manage the VDS I simply Remote Desktop into it using the standard windows client and manage the machine as if it was a real dedicated server. Prices starts at around $42.00/month and more information can be found by clicking here.
I setup my VDS with .NET 3.5 runtime and configured three websites I am prototyping so far without issue. This is a great option with maximum flexibility but minimum support from the hosting provider.
Blogger Visitor Tracking
His second question focused on how I track visitors to my blog. The answer here depends on the statistic we are talking about:
Daily Visitors. For tracking visitors to the various blog entries I use Google Analytics. To use this service you simply register with Analytics for free with your Google account and they provide you with a small amount of HTML to embed into your site. Once the HTML is embedded they starting tracking visitors and provide updates every 24 hours. You can even setup email's daily or weekly in PDF (and other formats) of your statistics which is very convenient.
The instructions for inserting Google Analytics HTML into blogger is well documented and can be found on sites like andywibbles.
RSS. Additionally I track how many people subscribe to my RSS feeds by using FeedBurner. Feedburner is a great free service (recently purchased by Google) that allows you to replace your standard Blogger RSS feeds with a special URL that then tracks statistics. The full instructions can be found here on the FeedBurner FAQ for Blogger.
Closing
I hope these answers are helpful to my colleague and anyone else who stumbles upon this post. If anyone has any additional questions please don't hesitate to contact me directly.
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