Website Popularity

The popularity of your website is measured by how many visitors it receives. The more visitors your website receives, the more data it will transfer, so it is an important consideration when choosing a web host.

The term visitors needs to be distinguished from other terms such as hits and page views. A hit is technically any request of your website; for example, an image being downloaded. A page view refers to a visitor looking at one page. A visitor is a single person (or computer) who visits your website, often looking at many pages. The differences can be illustrated by the following example:

A visitor looks at five pages of your website, each page containing four images. This registers as one visitor, five page views, and 25 hits. (Each page view counted as five hits; four images, and one HTML document.)

Web hosting companies usually increase their costs relative to the amount of data your website is transferring, hence; the greater your website's popularity, the more it will cost. The sheer number of visitors is not the only consideration: how much they download will determine the actual data transferred.

If your website is laden with large graphics, sound files and movies, your visitors will download more. A visitor on this type of website might use the same amount of data transfers as 100 visitors on another website. When choosing a web host, estimate the amount of data that will be transferred by each visitor, and use this to determine the web hosting plan best suited to your website.

If you believe your website's popularity will cause it to be under a heavy load, you should consider a web host that does not charge the earth for additional data transfers.