what is the difference between dns query and web statistics

trying to figure out stats

[bomburmusicmallet]

Hi,

I am a webmaster for a business that has a few websites, and many more domain names that redirect to those websites. My client uses a DNS service to manage the domain names; however, everything is ultimately pointing to one of his two separate hosting accounts, either the main domain account or a subdomain account.

Today, my client sent me recent "DNS query" stats:

Dec 2,117,764
Nov 2,258,095
Oct 1,806,773
Sep 1,333,802
Aug 1,192,908
Jul 924,191
Jun 774,654
May 835,991
Apr 566,419
Mar 492,844
Feb 419,523
Jan 381,189

However, when I look at the website stats, the "unique visitors" and "number of visits" are a sliver of these numbers. Here are some numbers from his busiest domain:

Month Unique visitors Number of visits
Jul 1901 2230
Aug 1995 2464
Sep 1890 2400
Oct 2087 2666
Nov 1914 2533
Dec 410 554

Just a bit more history: my client switched to a different host in June, which is why the stats prior to July are not obtained. My client also suspended google ads at the beginning of December (there were never that many clicks). Also, I started bello-monitoring at the end of November.

My client is wondering what might be resulting in so many queries? Any ideas? Or where I can get this information?

Thanks.

[gregbo]

Generally speaking, DNS queries resolve the hostname (www.example.org) to an IP address. To be more specific, I'd have to know exactly where your client got the DNS queries from (e.g. which name servers).

[bomburmusicmallet]

>>I'd have to know exactly where your client got the DNS queries from (e.g. which name servers)

The DNS queries were totals of all the IPs that my client has. (Is that what you meant?) But the totals end up resolving to one of two IPs, and the web stats numbers I posted for the bigger of the two IPs aren't anywhere near the DNS query numbers. Another report I was sent provides the DNS by domain name, and this particular one is 2,211,322 for the month of December alone. The web stats for this month so far are only 554 visits, which is consistent with past years' December numbers also considering that google ads have been suspended.

[jtara]

This is bizarre. DNS queries will normally be a small fraction of total page views, or even unique visitors, because DNS data is cached - by the user's own resolver, by their ISP, possibly by servers that the ISP peers with, etc. etc.

Hard to tell without also seeing page views (I don't know how many page views you tyDNS TTL (Time to Live) is set to a very low value, combined with long, high-page-count visits? (i.e. the cache is being invalided due to the low TTL, causing multiple DNS queries to your server per visitor.)

[gregbo]

Actually, depending upon what the sites are used for, DNS queries may be in excess of total page views. For example, if you site can be referenced over the web as example.org, people will make an query for the IP address(es) of the web site (A records). But if mail can also be sent to [e-mail], the query will be for the IP address(es) of mail exchangers (MX records).

If possible, please break down the DNS queries according to record type and query.