In reply to Ryan Hellyer.

I would have to disagree as far as your statement regarding businesses and storing sensitive information with third-party services.

Steam is effectively a specialized analytics solution. Companies have absolutely no issue leveraging Google Analytics and the many, many hosted analytics solutions that are out there. Stream is really no different.

The fact that Google Analytics, GoSquared, Kiss Metrics, or the countless other analytics solutions are hosted services hasn't hurt their adoption in the least.

In fact, most businesses would rather put their trust in a hosted service for analytics than host and manage their own analytics server and solution. There are of course always exceptions and for those exceptions there are solutions such as Piwik that you can host yourself. But you need to be prepared to to scale and more importantly know what you need to do in order to scale when it happens. That's not something most businesses are prepared for.

You host your web site with a web host, a third party. You're already trusting your data with this web host. In many cases doing so simply because you read a good review online about this host and nothing more. And in this case it's not JUST analytics data, it's everything that encompasses your site as a whole. (I use "YOU" here generically, not specifically meaning you individually).

Smart businesses know when to do things themselves and when to leverage 3rd parties. I wouldn't call the vast majority of self-hosted WordPress installs as being managed by users who truly know what they are doing. Businesses that require this type of data analytics should want to leverage a service that can provide a stable, secure, scalable solution.

Scaling is not as easy as it sounds. ESPECIALLY when it comes to data and data analytics. It's why there is an entire industry specifically focused on data analytics, data mining, etc.

Where the team at Stream wants to take the product, AND the functionality it's users want to see simply isn't the type of thing that is ideal to power using your average shared web host and MySQL.

High traffic WordPress web sites already require optimized hosting environments, caching, etc. Which works great. Those same tactics don't work with a data analytics application. The more traffic a WordPress site gets, the more Dashboard interaction, the more plugins, the more posts... all of this increases the volume of data related to this type of analytics.

When you get into things like trigger and alerts based on activity like Stream does your datastore needs to be blazing fast and realtime. That means caching traditionally leveraged by WordPress site owners is thrown out the window because it's not applicable to this type of use.

These types of situations are precisely why solutions such as Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, Google's Cloud, Keen.io, Iron.io and countless other cloud solutions have gained massive popularity.

I haven't even touched cloud services like SendGrid, Mailgun, Mandrill, Amazon's SES, Postmark and many others like them that are used every single day by people to send sensitive data: email. Not only that but many web hosts already leverage these services and are already sending your email through a cloud service, even if you don't know it's happening.

Just because you can host something yourself doesn't mean you should and data analytics functionality is a great example of something you shouldn't be hosting on a typical WordPress hosting account.