Business Via Internet
By Jon Miller
Charles Flaum wrote:
> Are sure that was 6000 visits or was it 6000 hits. It's very hard to
> determine the actual number of visits since one visitor can easily be
> counted as 10 hits depending upon how they cruise around your site.
While I do realize this is not directly related to mechanical music, I'm commenting since the subject has been raised and it is a topic about which there is much confusion.
At this time, there really is not much one can do to truly determine the number of visitors to any given WWW site. The most common number people quote is the "hit count" as provided by his/her ISP. The problem with hit count is twofold: First, each time a page is loaded it can count as numerous hits - one hit for the html page itself, plus one hit for each and every graphic, sounds, etc., which is sent from the server.
A single "page" loaded by a visitor can therefore count as many hits, depending upon the complexity of the page. I work on one site, for instance, which has about 30 different pages and over 300 graphic images. If one visitor to the site goes through everything, this can produce nearly 10,000 "hits".
Another problem is that hits are only counted if a page is actually sent out by the server. This leads to other problems. Depending on how one has his/her browser set up, a page might be reloaded only once per visit, or each and every time that page is accessed during a single visit (or it may not be 'reloaded' at all unless 'forced' to reload).
Many ISPs can provide the site owner with a list of hits, showing the ip address to which each file was sent and one can attempt to extrapolate from this. However, even this is not reliable since most 'net users do not have static ip addresses and it is therefore possible, for instance, to have the same ip address used by several people (at a given ISP) on the same day.
Maybe someday these problems will be resolved, but for now we are stuck with a less-than-adequate system.
Jon Miller
St. Paul, MN |
(Message sent Mon 3 Feb 1997, 09:49:40 GMT, from time zone GMT-0600.) |
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