Counter number one has been running since 2006
The first counter ever created on this site was created on 18 November 2006, at three minutes past eleven at night. It has the ID 1.
It counted visitors today. It stands at 703,428, and it took about 25,000 hits in the last thirty days, which makes it busier now than most of the counters created since.
In November it turns twenty.
What it has been through
Nothing, from its own point of view. That is the interesting part.
Underneath it, the software it depends on was taken apart and rebuilt this year. Before that came three years in which nobody was minding the site at all — no new sign-ups, no fixes, nobody answering anything. Around half the counters being delivered were returning something other than a number, and no one knew.
Counter number one went on incrementing through all of it. Nobody had to re-paste a code snippet, migrate an account, accept new terms, or find out what had replaced what. The thing simply carried on doing the one job it has.
What else is still running
Of the counters that took a hit in the last couple of weeks:
- 5 were created before 2010
- 645 between 2010 and 2015
- 360 between 2016 and 2019
- 436 in 2020 or later
The bulge in the middle is the era when small personal websites were ordinary. Those pages are still there, and so are their counters, quietly adding up.
The honest version of why
It would be pleasant to present this as a triumph of careful stewardship. It is not. For three of those years there was no stewardship whatsoever, and the site still came through it.
The real reason is duller and more useful: a counter survives because there is very little of it to break. No account to expire, no API version to deprecate, no SDK to update, no pricing tier to be moved out of, no dashboard redesign that relocates the thing you used. One image, one number, one database row. Simple things last, not because anyone is looking after them, but because there is nothing there to go wrong on its own.
That is worth weighing when you choose what to measure your site with. The question is not only which tool answers the most questions today. It is also which one will still be answering anything at all in 2046 — and the honest answer for most of the industry is that the product will have been discontinued, acquired, or redesigned into something else long before then.
You can look at counter number one whenever you like: it is the live example linked at the top of every page on this site. It has been the example for a long time.