I have used Woopra for a long time now and so far my experiences have been fairly good. They are a beta service, but yet there hasn’t been too many hiccups along the way. I like the fact that they are free, but they will go paid, they said. I don’t know if I’m ready to pay for them yet, but depending on the price I might shell out $5 a month for them, but with so many free alternatives (Google Analytics), its not very promising.

Recently however, I have had quite a bit of trouble with Woopra. First of all, they haven’t made a client update in a while, despite @eliekhoury, a software developer for Woopra, saying that there is going to be. See Below The current client isn’t too bad, however its plagued by a decent amount of bugs that make the client unusable.  There are many posts on their Forum regarding issues, but they have yet to be fixed. Another big problem, recently, is server outages, I understand that your beta and don’t host your own servers, but still. At least they apologized and recognized it on their blog: Sorry, Followup. I give them props for that, but it should never had happened in the first place. Finally, when you signup for Woopra, you get added to a big list of other users (6,000) waiting for a spot to get your site approved. Now back when I joined, the speed was a week or so, but since Woopra has slowed operations (Post), it takes much longer! (2 months) Now I understand that they don’t want any more sites, because they are already tracking more than they can handle, but at least inform users of the wait so you won’t get hundred of forum posts, comments, and tweets all saying "Invites please!". See Below

              

Its not a problem with my host!

            

Woopra Plugin reports that I have a hosting problem?

 

What I’m really mad about is the fact that I can’t analytics for my WordPress and I can’t edit this site on their site. I understand that you’re beta, but that doesn’t mean that your support has to suck and that no one answers anything on the forum. I have sent them a support email, twittered many times and posted and replied to numerous forum posts regarding the problem. Elie El Khoury managed to respond once: Still?, but other than that, nothing! Its not that I need analytics for our blog, but I’m just disappointed with the way they are handling this. If I’m going to get this type of service, why would I ever want to pay anything? See Update 2 On the up side, all my other sites seem to be working fine.

I hope Woopra gets their act together and fixes this, especially when they give the impression that they care more about their WordPress Plugin than anything else. In the mean time, it looks like I have to stick to good ol’ Google for my analytics.

Update: Woopra just posted their State Of The Union :) They announced their new client, which personally looks awesome! I guess I can understand why it took so long. I can’t wait for it now! Only a couple of weeks now… They also say that they “scaled up” their hosting by 300%, which could account for the troubles in the site over the past few weeks. Hopefully it will be better now! Also, they said they will start approving batches of sites over the next few days. Read the link for more info, like pricing and stats.

Update 2: I woke up this morning to tweets from @eliekhoury (#1, #2) saying that he will look into the error and fix it. Well sure enough, everything looks good on my end. I reset my API key just in case but everything look good! Rock on Woopra! I do realize that most of this post is striked out, but hopefully I will be able to write a better post when Woopra comes out with their new client :)

Until then, 
- James Hartig

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