Using Bitly vs My own click tracking script

Hi

Would like to know peoples opinion on what they think i should do. I have a website that automatically gets and displays specific RSS feeds from two other websites. (in partnership with those websites). We would now like to analyse/track the clicks coming from my website to those generating the feeds.

I could easily develop a script that tracks the clicks and saves them to MySQL.

I also know and have made use of Bitly(the URL Shortening service). It is popular because of its good analysis/tracking of clicks. I know I can use it as well. Benefit would be that I can hand over all click analysis to Bitly. All I will have to do is use its API to generate the Bitly links.

BUT, I will be handing over all click data to Bitly, meaning that if Bitly is down or decides to go commercial, then I would be in trouble.

IF I do all click tracking through my script and MySQL, it means my database would eventually grow to be quite sizeable which may or may not be a problem. still thinking

What do u think?

Why do you think there might be database problems? In my limited experience I’ve been amazed at how well they take whatever I throw at them. They can get very large. But why would that be a problem?