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, then if someone wants
to see this page using a browser, it takes THREE hits to see it 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 the 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 SPARC stations made by Sun Microsystems, Inc. (any decent
university or tech company has plenty of such machines), there might be more than
one user browsing the same web site at the same time on the same machine. 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.
Even with fancy tracking mechanisms such as Netscape cookies, the situation mentioned
above will make even cookies useless. Regrettably, most people are not informed about
these things and believe that they can get an accurate count of visitors. It is not true.
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. Now along comes someone who repeatedly reads all your pages, three
iterations in total, and thus contributes 30 hits in so doing. But in reality you have one
and only one person responsible for the 30 hits.
Don't be disappointed. In general, the more hits your Web pages get, the more popular they
should be. Certain sites get more than a million hits a day. Roughly they have about
several thousands to ten thousand people visiting them every day. That's all. Not a
million viewers.
As a sidenote, our monthly data transfer limit for a Virtual Host account is 2000 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 1,024,000 hits every
month before you reach the limit. Our best wishes :-).
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