The terminology used on the statistics report can be a little confusing. Here is a brief explanation of the major terms used:

Hits: The number of times a browser has requested a file from your site. Note that everything on your site, including images, counts as a hit. If there are four images on your home page, a hit to your home page will register as five hits — one for the html page, one for each image. The same is true for "Files," below.

Files: The number of times a file has been downloaded from your site. This should be less than the number of hits, and is a somewhat more accurate representation of the traffic on your site. For example, if a person visits an index page on your site three times in one session, using it to link to other pages on your site, it will register three hits. But because the visitor's browser will have the page cached after the first hit, it will register as only one file. KBytes The actual amount of data transferred — the total size of all the files downloaded from your site.

Pages: These are files that have a suffix that is considered a "page" by the analyzer. For instance, ".html" and ".php" are considered pages, but ".gif" is not. This is used to approximate how many actual pageviews you have had, but doesn't indicate whether they were viewed by different people or not. Also, it can be thrown off by included files — a .php file that includes a .html file, for instance, will register as two pages, even though both are actually displayed on a single page.

Visits: Visits are an attempt to approximate how many times people have visited your site. What it measures is any group of hits to files on your site from a unique IP address that has no gap larger than 30 minutes in it. So if somebody browses to your site and looks at pages, then returns to look again in 31 minutes, that will count as two visits by a single IP address. This is a very rough approximation, but is probably still as close as you'll come to measuring the number of people looking at your site — counting those who return for separate visits more than once (after all, if you go to a restaurant twice in one week, they're still going to consider it two customer visits).

Sites: Unique IP addresses that have made hits on your web site. A rough approximation of the total number of people who have looked at your site one or more times over the course of the month. Very rough, in fact — one IP address might be used by many dialup users who have looked at your site. Conversely, one dialup user may have used many IP addresses to look at your site, as the user will not be given the same address each time they connect.

URLs: The number of unique files on your site that have been requested. If a page with no images is requested 1,000 times, and downloaded 500 times (because it was cached the other 500 times), it will count as 1,000 hits, 500 files, and 1 URL. If the same page had three images on it, it would count as 4,000 hits, 2,000 files, and 4 URLs.

KBytes: How many kilobytes of data have been served up from your site. This is the data we use to determine your bandwidth usage at the end of each month.

Referrers: These are the pages from which people came to your pages.

User Agents: The web browsers and versions used by people viewing your site.

Response Codes: Codes returned by the server to indicate whether a file was successfully retrieved, and if not, why not. By far the majority of these should be 200 (file was retrieved successfully) and 304 (file was not retrieved because the browser already had it cached).