Google analytics is very good if for example your server doesn't have somekind of a stats software or you use only html and don't know anything about server side scripting, even though I agree that using statistics on your website takes much of webspace, then I was logging everyone into the database, after 12 months you can really have lots of data, from that time I prefer to use simple text files for logging a user page view and just using different names, from all that data you can make and see whatever you want with little bit of coding, of course if you don't log every visit, but just make the counters count and store the ip addresses or something, then I guess a mysql is the right choice or if you like that your mysql database gets over 50 MB or even much more then it's also good, I guess databases are meant to do that, but I still prefer to use text files database for this purpose.