Thanks for reading, I hope you can help.

In the control panel for my website, there are a number of things I don't understand. The main problem is the 'SITE STATISTICS'. There are different catagories show in graphs.

They are:
HITS
FILES
CACHED
PAGEVIEWS
SESSIONS
KB SENT.

Could someone please give me an explanation of what each of these mean. Also, the number of HITS doesn't match the number of PAGEVIEWS ? I don't understand any of it.

Thanks for your time.

Stephen.

HITS are every request to the server. Including gifs, jpg, css files etc...
CACHED: browser cache (store a local copy on the hard drive) your web page for a period of time. This is done to speed up loading time if the user comes back to your site soon.
PAGEVIEWS: this is a subset of HITS. Normally a pageviews are requests for .html .htm .php etc... In other words, it's a file which generates a page. Naturally, this number would be smaller than HITS since images and css files are excluded.
SESSIONS: Is another way of saying "unique visitor". web stat programs use the visitor's IP and referrer log to build a map of users movement on the site. A session is a user.
KB Sent: total transfer you have used. If your accont allows 4 Gig, that would be approx 4 million KB.

Hope this helps

Thanks Wazeh,

If you have the time/knowledge to answer this question, please let me know the answer:

"My website is made purely in Flash. It has a pre-loader of about 1 min to download the entire content of the site. Does this mean the difference between HITS and PAGEVIEWS is the number of people that went to my site and left before it loaded ?. I am a little confused because your answer to my previous question helped me alot, but I don't have any jpgs, css stylesheets on my site. Only the Flash file (.swf) and one .gif image (which is a link to the Flash Player download center for those who don't have the plugin installed in their browser).

Please answer this if you have the time,

Thanks again for your help

Stephen.

Well, understand that a hit is *everything*. This means that a page with 3 images on it would register 4 hits (assuming the visitor allowed it load fully).

One for the html page + the three images = 4 hits.

Include any reference to anything in the page plus the page itself for this figure.

While you might think a pre-loader of one minute is a good idea, I can guarantee you that there are a good number of people who *will not* wait one minute for this. I know I wouldn't.

Gopher, like Chicken said, every hit is a hit. Every request made by a browser to the server is a hit. Not only every picture, but also every failed request such as error 404 (file not found) and other errors are all hits. Also Internet Expolorer 5.0 and above tries to load an icon file /favicon.ico so that is also a hit.

I think waiting 1 minute is way too much. Most people are impatient. I would say anything over 20 seconds is too much. I know I wouldn't wait one minute.

I hope this cleared things a bit.