Can't someone else do it?

Drupal and our web server do a number of tasks which can easily be offloaded onto other services, either free of charge or at minimal cost.

Statistics

By default, the statistics module is disabled within Drupal. This is a module which would allow us to collect usage statistics about our site. While these statistics are a good thing, if we used Drupal to collect and manage them, we would be adding to the work we need it to do in the course of powering our social network. Instead, we should leave the module disabled and look to use third-party services, which do an excellent job of logging statistics and visualizing them for us. In particular, there is Google Analytics, a free comprehensive statistics package, where all the logging and processing is done by Google—saving our servers the need to process that data. You can sign up for a free account at http://analytics.google.com. Google Analytics provides a very detailed breakdown of our website's visitors and content...