Hits are such a poor way to measure web traffic. Visitors and unique visitors are much more accurate. A hit on a website is on any file that is called from the server. Let's say this page has 10 images, 2 javascripts, 1 css file, and a php file; that would be 14 hits for this page alone, greatly misrepresenting how much traffic comes to this site when measured in hits.
"rabidgopher04" wrote:
That's insane, I've heard of hit counters like that, but in over a decade of web development and administration I've never seen a counter behave like that.
I quoted the word hits for a reason and I didn't say it was a good measure of web traffic, but its the only one I have available since we used three hosts during 2010 and I no longer have access to the good stats from the original host.
The counter here increments by one whenever a .php file is loaded from the server. Hit F5, counter goes up by one if you are on the site and not a file. Click a link on the forums, counter goes up by one. Etc ... it doesn't count graphics or CSS files or db queries, nothing like that. It's a very simple counter. There's also a mod I can that tracks each unique IP, but I think it slows the site down so not worth it to me.
The amount of hits don't matter to me all that much, but I like stats so I do check them out from time to time for grins.