Server Side Web Analytics Recommendations?

Anyone have suggestions on this?

It seems the entire industry is hell bent on using client side technologies for tracking web statistics. But besides the ease of setup, I see more disadvantages than I do advantages. "Back in the day"... I used webtrends and it handled everything we needed... but they got greedy and increased their price to $50,000+... so I stopped using them.

Fast forward 10 years and I'm surprised that I still don't see any decent server side web analytics software... I just want to point a config file to my website's access log, throw a script into cron, and forget about it.

There's always a chance my perspective is flawed... so I'd love for someone to "set me straight"... but here's how I see it:

Disadvantages to Server Side Analytics compared to Client Side
- Takes more knowledge to setup
- Takes server resources (though they can be offloaded)
- If you screw up your cached history somehow, it's a pain to fix.

Advantages to Server Side Analytics Over Client Side
- Real Time Analytics is possible
- Processing can be offloaded to another server.
- No waiting for 3rd party websites to register each http request
- No more extra http requests hitting a third party .js file
- Keeps nosy 3rd party sites out of my business
- Decrease page load times
- Gain total control over everything

I've tried piwik, webalizer, awstats... and found them lacking. So which is it?... is there a good option out there that I'm missing?.... or are client side analytics programs simply the greatest invention ever?

Noone has an opinion on javascript based analytics programs vs. server side?

The main reason I stick to JS based tracking is really just ease of implementation and use.

Takes 15 seconds to plop a GoogleAnalytics code in a clients site, and I'm so familiar now with the software that I find it a waste of time to use anything else.

As far as the con's you mentioned above, a lot of JS based tracking companies are doing pretty good as far as real-time analytics goes - but at the end of the day I really don't need that kind of data - I do fine with monthly reports for most of my clients.

The server side solutions seem to be (especially with those high price points) made for much larger sites with huge networks, and budgets.

Wish I actually had an answer for ya!