We just got this email from the Google Analytics team:

We love that you love our product and use it as much as you do. We have observed however, that a website you are tracking with Google Analytics is sending over 1 million hits per day to Google Analytics servers. This is well above the "5 million pageviews per month per account" limit specified in the Google Analytics Terms of Service. Processing this amount of data multiple times a day takes up valuable resources that enable us to continue to develop the product for all Google Analytics users.

Processing this amount of data multiple times a day takes up valuable resources that enable us to continue to develop the product for all Google Analytics users.

As such, starting August 23rd, 2010, the metrics in your reports will be updated once a day, as opposed to multiple times during the course of the day. You will continue to receive all the reports and features in Google Analytics as usual. The only change will be that data for a given day will appear the following day.

We trust you understand the reasons for this change.

I totally respect this decision, and I think it's very generous to not kick us out.

But how do we do this the right way -- what's the official, blessed Google way to use Google Analytics if you're a "whale" website with lots of hits per day?

Or, are there other analytics services that would be more appropriate for very large websites?