Wow Scott,
I wish all our users were as wordy (in a positive way!) as you are. Thank you for taking a good chunk of your time to elaborate on all these issues.
I will try to summarize some key points:
- Perfomance: we offer a premium add-on that allows users to define a separate DATABASE where to store all the information collected by our plugin. This extension was designed as a solution to the performance issues you highlight in your message. By using a separate database, most of the problems are gone because this way the database used by WordPress is not impacted at all.
- Disk/Memory Usage: like I said, we will add some more information to the requirements and on our website, to clarify how much disk space is needed, and how data grows over time.
- Caching Plugins: yes, Slimstat might negate the benefits of such plugins, however please keep in mind that you could install our plugin on a separate server and just add the tracking code to your cached website, just like you would do with Google Analytics. Again, this would solve all the performance issues at the cost of using another server to keep track of your traffic.
- Most of what you point out could be summarized with the well-known way of saying "no pain, no gain" ;)
- We don't feel like recommending web hostings, as our users are all over the world, and it would not be fair to just promote a handful of providers. Our experience is not this vast to allow us to be experts in that field.
Cheers,
Camu