[Anonymous]

how do i find out how many hits my site gets?
i checked the stats page, but don't know how to interpret data.
thanks.

[will]

that depends what you mean by 'hits'. do you want to know how many visits from unique IP addresses? how many actual hits on a page? this is a very difficult subject, and not as simple as it would seem.

looking at the 'sucessful requests for pages' and 'distinct hosts served' will give you some idea.

if you need a rough idea, adding a counter (http://counter.dreamhost.com/) to your site will give you that. if you don't want visitors to your site to see it, you can shrink the image to 1 pixel by 1 pixel (making it basically invisible), and then view the URL directly.

if you need more detailed statistics, i'd suggest getting a stats program for your home machine and downloading your raw logs files. this will give you a more detailed longterm picture.