Posted by cwdjrxyz on 11/06/06 21:29

Thierry Lam wrote:
> Is there some website out there which counts how many hits a website is
> taking on a daily basis? For example, I want to know how many hits the
> website wikipedia.org is getting, how would I get this kind of
> information?

Off hand, I can't think of any major commercial sites that make hit
data available. A few hobby sites have a hit counter installed that
displays the number of total hits on their site to viewers. However,
this can count only direct hits. Many hits to a page are to a cached
version at some isp that caches pages to improve the efficiency of
their service. Thus a hit counter would miss all of these, and they may
total more than the direct hits. Also the hit counter can often be set
to start anywhere you wish, and some site hit counters seem to be
inflated as much as the egos of the site owner.

If you are interested in detailed hit data on pages on your own server,
Webalizer and other like programs installed on the server can supply
very detailed hit data including where requests are coming from, hits
by page, hits per day, month, whatever. Again this only applies to
direct hits. It is a good tool to see if your server is being
overloaded at times, which of your pages are most popular, how much
bandwidth is being used, etc. This can be especially useful if you have
a very busy site with pages that require a lot of bandwidth, such as
streaming audio and video ones. Some better hosting services that
cater to small business have Webalizer installed, and you just have to
turn it on at the control panel. If you own your own server, Webalizer
or a like program may be installed on it by you.

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