I used to have a hit counter a long time ago. I took them off because I started getting so much traffic I actually broke a few hit counters... like seriously, hehe. I do use a hidden counter from statcounter.com but I can only get detailed information on the last 100 people from them, I have more detailed stats and far more indepth stats held on my own server though.. but I still keep statcounter.com's stuff up because it's more convenient.
Since I installed statcounter.com's code (which wasn't too long ago.. not going to give you an exact date though) I have had 5,011,705 visitors and 217,862,638 page views.. haha -- just to put my traffic into perspective by the time I finish writing this sentance I would have got about 40-80 more people to the site and hundreds of page views.
I could show the counter at the bottom of the site, but I personally think it looks kinda tacky
I used to have up at the top a counter that showed how many people were online also... it's still on the front page, but doesn't show the people that didn't either hit a forum page or the front page... so if they went directly to the download page or any other page on the site they don't show in that total... ehh I dunno