What is a hit? Is the number of hits a good measurement of my web pages' popularity?

A hit is typically defined as one file transfer from a Web server to a browser. Thus, if you have a Web page which contains some text, and two .gif files, THREE hits load that page completely. This is because each .gif file counts for one file transfer as well as the text file itself.

The implication of this is that using "hits" as a measure of the popularity of your Web pages is at best a rough estimate. With current technology, it is IMPOSSIBLE to get a precise count of the number of visitors who have seen your pages.

There are some service companies and software vendors who claim that they can track the number of users visiting your web site. This is misleading at best. On a multiuser workstation, such as the popular SPARCstations made by Sun Microsystems, Inc., there might be more than one user browsing the same web site at the same time on the same machine. The same would apply to users connected on a LAN via a combined network hub/router all using the same single dial-up line. The identities of such web surfers are not transmitted to the web server software, thus the latter has no way of differentiating such surfers at all.

In addition, some Internet Access Providers have started to cache some of the most demanded pages on their caching servers. If you own a site that is regionally very popular, some of your pages may be loaded from the ISP's server, rather than yours. No software can currently account for that type of hits.<

Even with fancy tracking mechanisms such as Netscape cookies, the examples mentioned above could even make cookies useless. Regretably, many people are not well informed about what hits really reflect and believe that they can get an accurate count of visitors. No, they can't, and they won't. The best one can get is an estimate, period.

As another example, say you have 10 Web pages, none of which contain any graphics, i.e. they are all textual in nature. By the above definition of "hit", it takes 10 hits to read them all. These 10 hits, however, only reflect one visitor. What if that same visitor loaded each of your pages 3 times, and thus contributes 30 hits in so doing. But in reality you still have one and only one visitor, not 30.

Don't be disappointed. In general, the more hits your Web pages get, the more popular the page is. Certain sites get more than a million hits a day. Roughly estimated, that means they have about several thousand people visiting them every day. That's all. Not a million viewers.

As a sidenote, our monthly data transfer limit for Budget Virtual Host account is 1000 MB. By the definition of "hit" above, if you have five files (textual, graphic, audio or else in nature) 2000 (2K) bytes each in size, then you can enjoy 512000 hits every month before you hit the limit. Our best wishes :-).