Posted on Monday, February 5, 2001 - 11:34 pm:

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Hits

Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic images, audio files, CGI scripts, etc... Each valid line in the server log is counted as a hit. This number represents the total number of requests that were made to the server during the specified report period.

Files

Some requests made to the server, require that the server then send something back to the requesting client, such as a html page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered a 'file' and the files total is incremented. The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'.

Pages

Pages are, well, pages! Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates an HTML document, would be considered a page. This does not include the other stuff that goes into a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the other 'stuff' that is in the page. What actually constitutes a 'page' can vary from server to server. The default action is to treat anything with the extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi' as a page. A lot of sites will probably define other extensions, such as '.phtml', '.php3' and '.pl'
as pages as well. Some people consider this number as the number of 'pure' hits... I'm not sure if I totally agree with that viewpoint. Some other programs refer to this as 'Pageviews'.

Sites

Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during the reporting time period. This DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited, which is impossible
to determine using just logs and the HTTP protocol (however, this number might be about as close as you will get).

Visits

Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address (site), the amount of time since a previous request by the address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). The default timeout value is 30 minutes, so if a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered.

Notes on Referrers
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Referrers are weird critters... They take many shapes and forms, which makes it much harder to analyze than a typical URL, which at least has some standardization. What is contained in the referrer field of your log files varies depending on many factors, such as what site did the referral,
what type of system it comes from and how the actual referral was generated. Why is this? Well, because a user can get to your site in many ways... They may have your site bookmarked in their browser, they may simply type your sites URL field in their browser, they could have clicked on a link on some remote web page or they may have found your site from one of the many search engines and site indexes found on the web.

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