Current Website Access Statistics
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Current Website Access Statistics
About these Stats
The Stats Report Explained
When you press the above submit button you will get an access report for this website.
This report shows the hits and number of bytes transfered in the past 24 hours.
The totals are shown at the bottom of the histogram. The counts for each of the previous 24 one
hour time periods are shown in the histogram.
The first usage reported at the top of the report is 1700 (5 PM). The counters are advanced every
hour on the hour so these figures change continuously throughout the day.
This form will only provide statistics for customers of Best Internet Communications. It will not work if your
site is hosted on another Internet Service Provider.
We also have our own page that displays the same access statistics in
a more understandable format plus Server 15 minute Load Averages for the periods.
And still another set of reports that show summaries of this
data over an eight day period in easy to read tables.
A comprehensive long term statistics report is also available. Response
problems caused by network delay can also be determined with our Tracer Route program.
Response problems can also be caused by a heavy load on our server.
To view the current one minute, five minute, and fifteen minute average load factors respectively,
press the button below. Hit your back button afterwards to return to this page. An explanation of load averages
can be found on this page.
Much more information is gathered about your visit than is displayed in these simple charts. When you visit any
web site your browser provides information to the site's server about what browser you are using, what page
you requested, what site referred you, the date, the time, and other information. Everytime you request a page all of this information and more is stored
on the visited site's log files. The webmaster of that site can then see and analyze what you did on their site. This includes
tracking every page you requested in sequence for each visits. A record of your visits and activities can also be maintained for
as long a period as the webmaster desires. You can see what information we have about you by pushing this button:
The statistics include graphic or image transfers. Actual page accesses, not counting images, is about
50% of the reported hits. So 6,000 hits would translate roughly into about 3,000 pages accessed per 24 hours.
At this time that also represents about 850 visitors per 24 hours. This means that our website
is currently providing about 90,000 page accesses to about 25,500 visitors per 30 day month.
For the math challanged, this means that the average visitor accesses 3.5 of our pages. Like all statistics,
these numbers will change in meaning, as you will learn, if you read on.
Hits Defined
A hit is counted in a server's log files whenever a file is called from that server by a broswer. When an HTML
page is called by the server this call may invoke numerous other calls. For example, if a page
has 10 images on it, these images will count as 10 hits. If the page calls a CGI script, that too
will be counted as a hit. If the page uses frames, each page within the frame counts as a hit, and
anything those pages call count as hits also. Too further complicate matters, if the page has
an animated gif that uses 10 gif images, that's right, it counts as ten hits.
I'm not sure if or how Java counts in all this.
Why some Page Counts are Overstated
So you see, a hit is not a simple thing, and more importantly, it can mean a lot of different things
depending on the complexity of the page. If the pages on a website contain many different images
on their different pages and use frames and CGIs, then those pages are going to have very
high hit rates. A visitor viewing a single page may actually generate 20 hits for that one view. And
10 hits on the next page he views, and so on.
Why our Counts are Understated
The pages on this website are very simple and designed to minimize the number of hits they generate.
There are only two or three images on a page and these images are virtually the same on all our pages.
These images include our background gif, our horizontal rainbow line gif, and our banner gif.
Once these images are called, they are not counted again when they are called again and
used in our other pages, which needs further explanation.
All of our statistics are substantially understated because of the use of caches by browsers
employed by the visitor. When a visitor views one of our pages that page is put into a cache
memory. When the visitor goes to another website and returns to our page, the browser will
call the page from the cache memory instead of from our website. This access of our
page will therefore not be counted. The nature of our entire website and especially of particular
pages is that the way visitors use it is to frequently call our pages from cache memory.
Let me provide an example of this. A visitor arrives at our home page and sees that we have
a list of Computer Trade Shows/Expos in our Silicon Valley Web Directory. The visitor goes to
that page and finds that he is interested in 30 of the expos and/or conferences listed there.
He then methodically goes down the list of shows on that page and clicks on each one of
the links. After looking at the website, the visitor presses his BACK key and returns to our
page. He repeats this process 30 times. The visitors has gotten 31 accesses of our page
(including his initial arrival) but this page is counted as having been accessed only once.
Most of our pages are subject to this kind of use. People using our Employment Opportunites
page may visit 40 pages linked from our site and be counted only once. Many
visitors go through our list of computer companies in the same way.
Visitors that use our Eureka! Internet Search Engine sometimes do this to the extreme. The visitor
may be researching a number of subjects or variations of a subject by accessing Alta Vista from
Eureka!. This visitor may do 20 searches from our page and be only counted once.
What's the Real Count?
So what is the real pages accessed count? That's anyone's guess. My estimate is that the true numbers are from
five to ten times higher than reported in the access statistics. The true number of pages accessed or impressions
is probably in the range of 450,000 to 900,000 page accesses (impressions) per month for this site
at this time. Or expressed in another way, the typical visitor (25,500 per month) actually
views 18 to 35 of our pages per visit.
When is a Hit a Hit?
All of this analysis is predicated on the simplist and most basic counting performed by a server. There are many other
ways to count visitors and visits to pages then this method. Many of these tecniques employ the analysis of log
files produced by the server. These log files contain a great deal of information that can tell much about
how a website is accessed. I use several of these programs which allowed me to determine the number of visitors
to this site and also to make an educated estimate of hits versus impressions. Public counters are also available and
operate in an entirely different way. If you are interested, I provide an explanation of public counters on my page called Secrets of Searching the Web & Promoting your Website. I also provide a little more information there about private counters.
In summary, whenever you hear hits being discussed, you now know you need a definition of the "hits", if they are
to be meaningful to you in any way. If no definition is offered, assume the worse, and place minimal value on the
numbers bandied about.
Who Cares?
If you have read this far, you may be asking yourself why I am devoting so much time and space to this
explanation. The reason is that we offer advertising space for sale on this site. Advertisers pay rates based on the number of visitors and impressions. It is similar to how other media sell advertising. A magazine
may talk about its circulation in terms of the number of magazines it has sold (circulation = visitors) and the
number of times the magazine was read by different people (1.5 people read each magazine). We don't
have too many people looking at a webpage on a monitor at the same time together, so the analogy isn't
very good there. The analogy also falls apart in this respect. Few, if any people, read a magazine more
than once, whereas a visitor may re-read a web page dozens of times at a single sitting as described above.
And if the information on the web page is always changing, as on our Computer Trade Show/Expos page
does, then that visitor is likely to visit fairly often to see what's new.
The Bottom Line
So the answer to the question of why the lengthly explanation is this. We want potential advertisers to
have a better understanding of what these stats mean in this new advertising media. We hope, that if
they do, they will be more inclined to place an ad here. This means you will likely be able to continue
using this free service because we have their support. Somebody has to pay the bills, you know.
More about Stats
These stats, produced by our internet service provider (ISP), are beyond our control and are an
honest representation of site activity.
These are the counters that our ISP uses to limit the access
to websites. A website is limited to 50,000 hits or 200 megabytes in transfers per
24 hours. Higher levels of usage are available with premium services at higher rates.
You may look at the stats of any Best resident domain name by replacing our domain
name with theirs and pressing the submit button. You can't make an assessment of the
number of visitors or impressions from the reported values without other statistical
analysis of the log files.
You should also be aware that the counts reported by this program will differ greatly on the weekends
from weekdays and during different periods of the day. Seasonal variations will also occur. Holidays
influence the amount of traffic too. These differences will be determined in part
by the type of site and the type of users of the site. This website is heavily traveled by business users
so usage on the weekends and in the evenings drops significantly from usage during business hours.
Our logs show that the peak times of usage for this site on business days is usually at 10 AM in the
morning and 1 PM in the afternoon, Pacific Time. Typically, we get the most visitors on Mondays and
Wednesdays. Other websites may exhibit entirely different patterns of usage. (10/18/96)
Eight Day Reports showing Hourly Access Statistics
These reports shows statistics identified at the top of the report for this website for each hour
for the previous eight days up until the most recent hour.
This information is updated every hour of the day at five minutes past the hour. If the time
period shows a zero it is because the server was down when the report was updated. It also may or
may not indicate that the server was down for the entire time period.
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