Insofar as your hit counter is concerned, I've been using Statcounter for the past 3 years. It is available free (www.statcounter.com) and is loaded with features-- and no annoying pop-ups

There is no requirement to use Bravenet's counter service on a Bravenet web site. There are lots of services available.

I use a free stat service from http://www.addfreestats.com. AddFreeStats is a full featured statistic collection service. All it requires is a little unobtrusive ad on your web pages. You can see it on my site in the bottom left. The ad is actually part of the collection script. While the image is being accessed for display, and the link created, visitor information is being collected.

Unlike Bravenet's counter, I can disable visitor access to my stats, so they never see any ads or popups. That is, of course, unless they decide to visit AddFreeStats through my link. Like any other service provider, they do have their share of advertisements.

While the AddFreeStats service is a little more complicated to implement, it gives very good information. I can see every site visitor, know where they originated from (country and server), know how they got there, how long they were there, what pages they viewed while they were there, where they went to when they left, what browser they were using, what resolution their screen is, yadada, yadada, yadada. You can get a synopsis of your site activity by day, week, month, or year. If a visitor found your site with a search engine, you can see what keywords they used to find it. This can be very valuable information if your trying to increase your search engine ranking. You can learn what keywords are working for you, and which ones are not.

To keep it even more unobtrusive, I don't display a counter. A counter is just an ego thing, and easy to fake. I personally, never believe what they say. The count is important to me, but I don't think anyone else really cares.

So, shop around. There is probably a service available out there, that better suites your needs.