What is the different between visitors and hits?

Many websites use the number of hits on their web site to get people into believing their web sites gets a lot of visitors. What most people don't realize is that a web site's popularity should not be measured by the number of hits, but by the number of visitors.

So when you see websites that have a hit counter that shows a large number of hits, it is nothing to bother about. It's important to understand the difference between hits and visitors when you want to know how much traffic that a specific web site gets.

One hit means that one file has be requested from the web server. That can be a web page, that is a htm or html file, but also a photo, drawing,  a hit counter, a java applet also if a background is added to the website, as it is to this htm page you are reading now, well that file, is also one hit. etc. Today, with many web pages containing lots of graphics file, one request to view one web page might result in 20 hits or more on the server. So how can that be? Well it is easy: If you have 19 graphic files and then 1 for the page itself, that is 20 hits.

Are "hits" an accurate way to judge how much traffic a web site gets?

Yes but it only for a use for the webmaster that can check the server performance and the internet connections. For you it is only one answer: No!

If you were to visit a web site and view 10 pages on that site and each page contains an average of 19 graphics, then you have just racked up 200 hits, but you are just one visitor.

Now I don't think you are suprised that Kandor and The Forgotten Empire only using visitors. It is also that if you just make a reload of the Main Gates, the counter don't count you again, it will be needed that you come back after 1/2 hours that it should count you as a new visitor again... or should I call you traveller...?
So know you know: Hits is for webmaster that want to see the traffic on the server, but it is better way to do it and add a hit counter... Individual visitors is for you to see how many it have really being in the website. So to use hits instead of visitors is only a way to show people that you can nothing about internet... Today with heave graphic sites and not easy to navigate it is some kind of new standard.... Badly, isn't it?

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