If you make decisions with money riding on the answers, it costs a lot more than CPU and DB.<p>Perhaps systems administration is somehow very cheap for you, but I&#x27;m willing to bet it is still not &quot;nothing&quot; - even if the cost is you personally not watching a TV show you like because you&#x27;re patching the web server on your analytics box for your personal vanity domain, that&#x27;s still a cost.<p>For most operations, sysadmins are somewhat expensive, and because of that, busy. This is why Urchin was such a good idea, and why Google bought them - the proposition is to trade your users&#x27; privacy for the admin time it takes to support another internal app. There&#x27;s an absolute no-brainer, assuming you don&#x27;t care about your users&#x27; privacy (IIRC, they were going to sell the service before Google ate them, but that&#x27;s ancient and trivial history).