Site statistics are provided by our ISP, Hetzner, from the actual web logs, and are verifiable and extremely accurate.  Any traffic advertising we do is based on these statistics (and we're justifiably proud of them!)  We occasionally carry fun statistics items like an incoming countries map, but these should not be regarded as indicative of actual traffic.

Stats provided by Hetzner:

Visits: This counts user sessions and represents the number of single visits to the site (a visitor may browse around several pages in the site, but the IP and browser id remains the same and the connection to the user's browser is not dropped)

Page requests: this is the number of web pages served in a given period. Some service providers like to list this as the number of visits, but we feel this is technically incorrect and also inflates the statistics unduly, and prefer to stick with Hetzner's usage.

Hits: this is the number of actual files served and will depend on how many images, style sheets, javascript files etc there are on each page.  The ratio of hits to pages served should not be too high, otherwise it's likely that the site is a bit heavy on images.  Our ratio seems fairly constant at between 5 and 6.

Provided the ratios between them stay fairly constant, any one of these can be used to monitor traffic growth trends and peaks, which is the important thing, but hits and page requests may be more useful than visits to see the effect of specific campaigns.  If, for example, we run an internal banner marketing campaign (such as a fund-raiser for the school) which attracts people to a particular part of the site, we might not expect the visits to increase, but we would hope to see a rise in the number of page requests and/or hits because visitors were clicking through to the campaign area and thus viewing more pages per visit.

Hetzner also provide the number of unique visitors by keeping a database of unique IP address/browser id combinations, but this is not really meaningful as most ISPs assign IP addresses dynamically from a range available to them, so the same one can be (and frequently is) used by multiple people over a period of time.  We usually get anywhere between 1500 and 2500 a month, but regard visits as a more useful statistic.

More detailed stats can be obtained on request from the webmaster.

     Site Statistics for January 2007

    Site Statistics for October 2006

    Site Statistics for September 2006

    Site Statistics for August 2006

   Site Statistics for July 2006

  Site Statistics for June 2006

 Site Statistics for May 2006

Site Statistics for April 2006

Site Statistics for March 2006

Site Statistics for February 2006

Site Statistics for January 2006