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, It takes THREE hits to 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.

The best one can expect is merely an estimate.

Don't be discouraged. 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.

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