what is the diference between 'hits' and 'visits'?

[Uzil]

When i check my statistics logs i find a big diference between the 'hits' and 'visits'. Now i'm confuse!

Can somebody be kind to explain me what 'hits' and 'visits'are?
Tanx

[Mardi_Gras]

First, this belongs in our Tracking and Logging forum - hopefully a mod will move it there.

Every time a page gets requested, the individual items on the page are requested from the server. Each one of those requests is a "hit." For most purposes, "hits" is a meaningless figure.

Visitors, you would hope, are individual and unique persons visiting your site. But determining exactly who are unique visitors is not nearly as easy as you might think. I suggest you read some of these threads for some more background on the subject (some assembled from a previous post by Claus):

"Intermediate Visitor Tracking"
[webmasterworld.com...]

"Poll: What web stats service do you use?"
[webmasterworld.com...]

"Page based stats vs log stats"
[webmasterworld.com...]

"Log Analysis vs. Outsourced (3rd Party)"
[webmasterworld.com...]

"with hosted tracking what important info do I miss out on?"
[webmasterworld.com...]

"A satisfactory stats package"
[webmasterworld.com...]

"How to accurately determine UNIQUE visitors a week"
[webmasterworld.com...]

"Log stats, or Graphic stats?"
[webmasterworld.com...]