I've been meaning to write this for a long time. I am an educator after all, and I am hoping that this rant will educate a few.

"10,000 hits in 10 Months" sounds great, but what does it really mean? What are hits?

"Hit counters record one hit for every time a webpage is viewed... problematic because it does not distinguish unique visitors."
www.opentracker.net

"Don't ever take Hits as an accurate indication of traffic to a website..."
www.go4.com.au

Try this test on a website that proudly displays a counter: click refresh/reload five times (or press ctrl+R) and if the counter goes up by five then the site is counting hits, not visits.

So when you see a website with a counter showing 10,000 hits it does not mean 10,000 people have visited that site.

A better way to gage the amount of people visiting your site is to use a more sophisticated tool than a simple hit counter. The most thorough and accurate one that I know is Google Analytics. And it's free.

(PS, if you want hits... we've had 282,000 in about 12 months according to cassowaryconnect.com sounds impressive doesn't it?!)