The highly technical pages on counters assume you have the ability to get into the guts of the server and place a CGI application. My guess is that if you're reading this, you don't have that ability. You simply want a counter on your page. What I can do is tell you how to go about finding the command that will plop the counter on your page. If the counter CGI is down, the page transfer comes to a complete stop.
Counters can be faulty and count incorrectly.
Viewers might have their in-line images turned off so will never see your count. A counter is an image. In most cases, it's a bitmap . Don't let it throw you. An image is an image is an image.