What is a good amount of traffic?

I having trouble translating how Unique Visitors, Number of Visits, Bandwidth, etc. all transfer into how much people are using my site.

How much traffic do you guys that have a lot of users see?  I'm up to nearly 50 users, but am not sure how the GBs of traffic translate into use.

look at statcounter.com

unique visits are just what you may think, unique; or better as organic. they searched and found your site.

if you have cPanel, you have awstats and I'm sure that is what your looking at.

there used to be a member here, long ago, he could explain much better. 

I will try to find some of his post to enlighten you.

When tracking the amount of traffic on a Web site, it refers to a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time. Software that tracks and counts Web site traffic can distinguish between visitors who only visit the site once and unique visitors who return to the site. Different from a site's hits or page views -- which are measured by the number of files that are requested from a site -- unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses, which are like online fingerprints, and unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site. There are some ISPs that use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, such as AOL and cable modem providers, which use different IPs for every file requested, making one visitor look like many. In this case, a single IP address does not indicate a unique visitor.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/unique_visitor.html

OK, that's what I thought.  But I wasn't sure if those are bots or what.  I'm around 300 unique views and average 2.7 GB of bandwidth per day right now and that seems high to me since I'm still trying to get the name out.

If you are getting 300 pageviews per day from 50 or so visitors at 2.7 GB's per day that is fairly sizable. If you take 2.7 GB's and round that off to 2700 MB's divided by 300 pageviews that is around 9 MB's per page load.

Pageviews are different than unique visitors. 300 unique visitors could make 1.5 pageviews or roughly 450 pageviews so it really depends on what the exact details are. If you are looking at Awstats then that does count bots and other automated stuff that doesn't necessarily reflect real visitors.

You would really need to look into what they happen to be viewing. 9 MB's per page load is fairly large, but if you have people viewing a lot of large videos or audio then that isn't necesarily that much.

If they are viewing other content then it could be a lot. If they are primarily looking at images and text then 9 MB's per pageview on average is a lot. I would check image size on pages and look into Dolphin cache settings.

Bandwidth isn't as big of an issue as it was several years ago, but you still want to make sure things don't get out of hand. If you had 10x as much traffic you would be pushing 27 GB's per day (810 GB's per month ish), which would certainly be up there in a shared hosting environment. Not that you can't use that much, but some shared hosts may start to get uneasy at that point.

Resource usage would be a bigger problem than bandwidth. So it kind of depends on what they are viewing or doing.

Thank you.  Hopefully I'll be using 30GB per day soon.

 All is true above too.

A good measure is to make sure you have

• mod_file_cache 
• mod_cache
• mod_disk_cache
• mod_mem_cache (if your going to use memcache)
• mod_deflate
• mod_expires
• mod_bwlimited

All these can be located in the Host Tools section under PHP Info.

Apache VersionApache/2.2.24 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.24 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/5.3.24Apache API Version20051115Server Administrator

webmaster@mynewbeetle.net

User/Groupnobody(99)/99

Max RequestsPer Child: 10000 - Keep Alive: off - Max Per Connection: 100TimeoutsConnection: 6000 - Keep-Alive: 5Virtual ServerYesServer Root/usr/local/apacheLoaded Modulescore mod_authn_file mod_authn_default mod_authz_host mod_authz_groupfile mod_authz_user mod_authz_default mod_auth_basic mod_file_cache mod_cache mod_disk_cache mod_mem_cache mod_include mod_filter mod_deflate mod_log_config mod_logio mod_env mod_expires mod_headers mod_setenvif mod_version mod_proxy mod_proxy_connect mod_proxy_ftp mod_proxy_http mod_proxy_scgi mod_proxy_ajp mod_proxy_balancer mod_ssl prefork http_core mod_mime mod_status mod_autoindex mod_asis mod_info mod_suexec mod_cgi mod_negotiation mod_dir mod_actions mod_userdir mod_alias mod_rewrite mod_so mod_bwlimited mod_php5

does not have to match this exact but this is how to get the best performance for speed.

I looked in my PHP Info section under Host Tools and didn't see anything like that.

Hello guys, i am trying as well to understand this. I checked cPanel awstats and from left to right is unique and ending in Bandwith, can someone please give me a better understanding of the stats below?

 OK I can't see what the numbers refer to but I will try take a guess anyway ....  if this was monthly readings / reports >>> you had 5689 unique visitors >  total traffic including returning visitors was 14,258 > number of page impressions was 2,164,551 > total bandwidth used during this time was 4.06 GB

I'm not 100% sure on this ...

yes

Can anyone explain what the numbers i gave here more or less what i am looking at? Its tough to understand that.

DO NOT use AwStat tool in Cpanel, it gives you incorrect information, misleading and not detailed. I just found out last week that the best way to analyze your traffic is using Google Analytics, which gives you details of your traffic, plus the real time option where you can see how many people on your site, what they're doing etc... and you will have a better chance for higher position on Google search engine by using Google  analytics (hence the word starting with ANAL). 

P.s Chubby chicks seem to like anal sex, don't they? 

 of course though they also have to have javascript enabled or google won't see them. Not sure why you think awstats lies but it correlates ACTUAL log entries from your webserver... how you digest them... well, that's another topic.

I have always stated that Google Analytics is the BEST tool around and it does not record / report on spambots whatsoever ... the results you see are exactly what your are getting at your website/s ...

 please see Detective08's reply. I did some test and found out AwStat or Cpanel  stats are bogus, it's good for show but to use it to analyze your traffic is not good.

This is what i found on the net, don't know much, but it seems like the article to be a close and honest post.

I agree about dynamic IPs and different devices possibly having a 'small' effect on results ... however I still stand by what I say about Analytics ...

Not only is analytics the most in-depth tool around for results of website but it is certainly the most accurate. The fact alone that analytics does not include bots into results is a huge factor in showing 'real' traffic results unlike many other analytics tools.

I don't really agree with this.

Maybe results are not 100% but say 98% more like ....

Google are masters at their game ... they make sure they cover things and are 'in the know' from every angle and have the best people around making sure they are on top of their game .. they will not be that much wrong! It's a big part of their business and reputation.

Have any of you tried https://www.quantcast.com?

 incorrect. awstats separates spider/bot traffic and hits. It just doesn't have the gazillion dollars like Google has to fluff it up with fancy algorithms/graphs for the point and clickers. Yes, I do appreciate Google Analytics, but awstats has all the same data.

Awstats is not reliable or accurate...

Google is more accurate because it's a block of code embedded in your site with strict criteria in place on what it tracks.

With Awstats no specific visitor data is collected.  Also, the server logs will record hits from search bots and other non-human visitors.  This can lead to the large numbers that reflect all of your traffic but don’t accurately reflect your human visitor traffic.