jhead

Agreed. Additionally, some business models simply don't mesh with cloud infrastructure pricing no matter the volume. There are definitely advantages to using cloud services, but most of the time bare metal gets you more hardware/performance at a lower cost in the long run, even when you factor in everything else that it entails.

> If their business model relies on knowing more, then they chose a lousy business model.

I must disagree. I certainly understand a desire for privacy and it's definitely within your right to block GA if you feel so inclined, but to assume that sites using GA to track visitors is some sort of shady business model is simply not true.

I've used GA and Heap (Analytics) to obtain extremely granular information about how users traverse a website. This information can be invaluable to businesses in order to understand the thought process that people go through on a website. The underlying goal may be more conversions (sales), but simply using and analyzing data from GA or any other analytics platform isn't going to magically force you to purchase my product/service. These types of insights help identify critical issues with your website - issues such as pages with information that isn't as clear as it could be, or other possible barriers preventing users from signing up. This can be purely technical (i.e. a bug on a specific page), or it could be a lack of information/understanding about your product or service, or many other possibilities.

If you don't trust Google or other similar companies with your data, then you're welcome to block them from tracking you. But I personally don't believe that you should equate the use and analysis of such tracking data as evil in every instance, because it's not.

This is no secret, take a moment to look at Hola's own website.

http://hola.org/faq#in_whatis

"Hola is a collaborative internet -- it works by sharing the idle resources of its users for the benefit of all."

"Hola built a peer to peer overlay network for HTTP, which securely routes the sites you choose through other Hola users' devices and not through expensive servers."

This is just another reason why you should always be aware of the services that you're using, especially when it could concern your security and privacy.

Stripe doesn't accept every credit/debit card out there and can often cause charges to be declined for ambiguous reasons. In my experience, PayPal doesn't have this issue. PayPal is also a preferred payment option by a lot of customers and visitors, believe it or not. We still have a lot of customers who refuse to use any payment option other than PayPal, which is honestly really disappointing. Removing support for PayPal would mean losing a lot of customers.