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In a web access report, what is the difference between "successful server requests" and "distinct hosts served"?
A web access report can contain a lot of information, but most people care about two items:
- Successful server requests
- Distinct hosts served
Successful server requests is the number of "hits" or individual page views that your web site received during a given time. This number is spurious, because if I go to your site and open one of its pages and then reload it ten times, that counts as eleven hits for your web site. It is not useful to report this number, by itself.
Distinct hosts, a.k.a. unique internet servers, indicates the number of unique internet servers, located at different ISPs around the world, through which users access your web site. By internet server I mean a server at an ISP onto which people log to get access to the internet, via dial-up, DSL, or cable. Every one of these servers is unique. It's got its own address, like earthlink.net or frontline.net or aol.com.
The problem is, one unique server can connect many, many people to the internet. All of those people will seem to be the same person, because they access the internet through the same server.
This is important to understand: everyone who accesses your web site via ISP server xyz.com will seem to be one person. (There's no way around this. That is how the internet is built.) Large ISPs like aol.com, comcast.net, or verizon.net sell internet connections to many, many people. But, in the log files of your web server, many of these users appear to be the same, single user: visitor x from server aol.com. Thus, hundreds or even thousands of users on AOL are all the same user to a web server.
(Actually, large ISPs like aol.com and verizon.net use many thousands of servers, and these servers are indeed distinguished in the web server log file by IP address. However, hundreds or maybe thousands of people can still seem like one person to a web server, if the people use the same ISP.)
See also this very good discussion, by Stephen Turner, of How the Web Works.
So neither of these figures — successful server requests and distinct hosts served — is useful by itself. Neither tells you how many visitors you had during a given month. But taken together, you can get a decent idea of the traffic that your web site receives.
For example, in October 2003, ebwebwork.com received 94,946 successful server requests (or "hits") that came from 9,879 distinct hosts (or unique internet servers). This is the language one would use to report web traffic to funders, board members, or other people who need to know.