SiliconRepublic.com Ireland's Technology News Service

StatCounter began back in 1999 when Cullen was a 16 year old web designer.

Customers would constantly ask him about traffic to their site, leading him to come up with the idea of StatCounter, a free service monitoring numbers visiting a site, where they were coming from, and what key word searches brought them there.

From its beginnings in a home office, StatCounter now has over 90 servers in Texas and six full-time employees in the head office at the Guinness Enterprise Center in Dublin.

“It started with just one shared hosting but as demand grew we had to move to our own dedicated servers, adding more and more to cope with demand.

“At the moment we’re adding about two new servers every couple of weeks,” he said.

While Cullen was studying computer applications in Dublin City University he spent every spare moment on what he says was “a pet project”, keeping costs at minimum, and funding the entire business himself.

Cullen says on receiving the award: “This is not really an award for me but recognises our members who have helped us to build one of the most popular web analytical services and web sites in the world.”

The company offers a free lifetime membership supported by advertising revenue but also provides more detailed services for a monthly fee of €7.

StatCounter tracks over 9 billion pageloads every month over a network of 2 million websites. On top of this it is gaining 1,500 new members daily.

By Marie Boran.