546550 Counter & statistics service -a light Google analytics

Hello :) This project is a hosted counter service that also provides basic statistics. Think about something like google analytics, obviously with modest complexity and less (just the basic) features. This is what I need: [login to view URL] WHAT IS IMPORTANT! I already have this script and two other (newer) versions created by three different programmers, none of them works with over 1000 users. The issue is the MySQL structure and the lack of experience in projecting a software. Gathering the data with PHP/Javascript is the easy part, displaying the statistics isn't hard either if the SQL is well projected AND the data is processed in the background. The problem starts when a counter is inserted to a website with 5000 hits/hour. Imagine having 10.000 clients like that. It comes to millions of queries and the MySQL server will fail. Not when gathering and saving but when requesting calculated data to generate reports. The other issue is saving and organizing (archiving) statistical data. The project is not hard if well thought before a single piece of code is written. Think about the following: - if you have 10k counters with and average 500 visits/counter/hour that will save 5 million IP addresses every hour, 120 million per day - you need to handle this waste amount of data with a MySQL database? or better to save every IP address as an empty file (named by the IP address) in a folder? I found the second solution less resource needy but not sure if it is the best solution - a background script (maybe a cron job) needs to process the gathered data for easy retrieval (maybe pre-generate HTML files) - this script does not need to be real-time but capable of handling billions of data and that should be OK with MySQL if someone knows how to project the software If needed, I will create the XHTML structure and will provide all the support for the one capable of creating the script. I also have the idea, how to make it work (you may have a better one) and I need someone who has the brain to understand and design the software architecture, the SQL database and the background scripts to save, process and retrieve this amount of data. I am looking for someone with exceptional vision and capability of engineering the software and creating the necessary MySQL structure with proper indexing, optimized to perfection. If you are a web-designer/php programmer, this job is NOT for you! It may need more than programming knowledge and does not need design at all. Please do not bid if you did not understand 100% the challenge described above. I am looking for someone way better than myself and three other, experienced programmers ... ;) Thank you!