Free CGI Hosting

Once you have a web site, there may be features you want to add that require some code on the web server in addition to code in the actual HTML pages. Such features as hit counters and trackers, search engines, guest books, forms processing, and many others all need server-side code. This server-side code can use any of a variety of technologies, but CGI is the most universal. Other common flavors are PHP and ASP.
If your web hosting provider won't let you put it on their site, or you may not feel comfortable installing them, you do have an alternative. There are a number of sites that provide code on their server that you can use in your web site. I have only listed the best ones I've found in each category, or ones that provide unique and useful features.

Better than cheap, they are all free!
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Free Site Indexing and Searching

If you have a significant number of pages making up your web site, it is helpful to your users if you provide a search feature.

The services in this category index every word on your site and provide you with the HTML code to add to your site to let your users search that index. In exchange for providing the free service, they display ads of some type on the search results page.
Key differentiating factors are what features are supported for searching, how much control you have over what is and is not indexed, how the search results are presented, if your site is automatically reindexed (and with what frequency) and how fast the search results appear after the user clicks on the Search button.
Picosearch.com logo

Add a free search engine to your site in minutes. You can pick the background color or graphic, font, and add a logo to the upper-left corner of the results page. No automatic reindexing. Very fast search results.

FreeFind Site Search Engine

FreeFind adds a "search this site" feature to your website, making your site easier to use. FreeFind also gives you reports showing what your visitors are searching for, enabling you to improve your site. FreeFind's advanced site search engine and automatic site map technology can be added to your website for free. Automatic reindexing.

Crawl-it.de banner

Crawl-it allows you to integrate a search engine into your web site—easily, fast and cost-effectively. Crawl-it only requires your internet address. Their crawler automatically indexes your complete web site monthly and holds a copy of the indexed keywords in a database. You only need to add a search entry field to your homepage and you can begin using it. You can also provide an advanced search form and have control over the formatting of the search results. This site uses Crawl-it, as you can see from the search box in the header of this page.

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Free Counters and Trackers

A counter counts. It's that simple. You can format it many different ways, but it generally just tells you (and your visitors) how many times your page has been viewed. Some may offer a breakdown by time of day, day of week, and day of month.

I don't see the point of a dispaying a counter. If you are just starting out, they just advertise how few people have visited your site. If your site has been very popular, then the rather large number that would be displayed is meaningless.

A tracker or analytics package gives much more information than that, but rarely has an option to display a counter on your pages.
It can show you how people found your site, what pages they viewed and for how long, and how many pages an average visitor looks at. This can provide you with feedback about your promotional efforts and suggest new words for your meta tags. It can show you what content on your site is most interesting to your visitors. By showing you what browsers and screen resolution are used to view your site, you can make better decisions about layout and what features to implement.

None of these services will provide you with information you could use to identify individual visitors to your site (such as IP addresses or email addresses). However, they can tell you about what domain they are in, and often even what time zone or country they are in.
Google Analytics logo

The introduction of the free Google Analytics service changed the landscape for all providers of web counters, trackers, and analytics software, regardless of whether their products were free or not. The graphs and reports provided are so comprehensive, and the user interface so clean and easy to use, it is hard to find a reason to use anything else. However, there are some features missing that may be important enough to you to make you investigate some others.

Extreme Tracking Service logo

I used Sitemeter on this web site until I switched to Google Analytics. Features in Sitemeter not found in Google Analytics include:

  • Visits, Unique visitors, and page views by day of week
  • Detailed information for the last 20 visitors
  • Last 20 referrals each from non-web-based email, Usenet, and hard drive (Google lumps these all into "Direct")
  • Last 20 referrals each from non-web-based email, Usenet, and hard drive (Google lumps these all into "Direct")
Freestats.com logo
SiteMeter logo

I used Sitemeter on this web site until I switched to Google Analytics. Features in Sitemeter not found in Google Analytics include:

  • Visits, Unique visitors, and page views by day of week
  • Detailed information for the last 100 visitors
  • List of the visitors currently on your site in real-time.
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Multiple Free Offerings

Free remotely hosted CGI scripts to improve your website.