I have been watching my referral logs and have noticed something strange. It seems that I have been getting at least two hits a day from webhosters.com since I signed up with them. Yet, whomever was visiting my site from webhosters.com appeared to only be loading the main page.

After looking through several pages of logs I found that every one of those hits from webhosters.com was from a script called Schmozilla. From what I can gather after a quick search on google, Schmozilla is nothing more then a page fetching script.

Why would webhosters.com be running such a script? The only reason I can think of is that they want to make you believe that a lot of potential customers are visiting your site from webhosters.com. Or am I missing something and there is a valid reason for using such a script?

I have actually noticed over time that they do also send me 1-2 hits a day.

Until now I actually thought they were sending me valuable people.

:-(

Could it be that they are just checking up on you, like for illegal content perhaps.

Mike

Like I said, from what I can gather after a quick search on google, Schmozilla is nothing more then a page fetching script. It just loads the page.

In my opinion, they are using the script to mislead hosting companies into believing that potential customers are coming from their site to yours. And maybe you should purchase advertising from them. I could be wrong, and there just might be a valid reason. I just don’t see it right now.

Or perhaps they are checking to see if the hosts listed in their database are still in business with a live website. ;)

Old and out of date data can be an issue when there are 4000 hosts in a database.

There's a very good chance they're checking to ensure your site's up. What better way to test server status than pulling up a user's site? Granted we create our own sites on servers for an automated tester, this is probably just a different way of doing the same.

Sincerely,

-Matt

Well, maybe it's meant to do both, this way or another it's an excellent marketing tool for them - funny I haven't thought of it first :)


Anyways when it comes to validation I think that it is better to send an email once a month or just user the feedback from the users on the site.