Kinsta Counts
The hosting options offered by Kinsta Counts are dependent on the total number of monthly visits to your server’s website. The sum of the unique IP addresses observed each 24-hour period as recorded in the Nginx logs determines the number of visits in a given month. We recently switched from a bandwidth-based pricing strategy to a visit-based pricing model since many of our users find it easier to grasp and calculate, and then choose the right hosting plan.
What is a Visit?
What Causes a Visit and What Doesn’t Cause a Visit
Visitor Counts and Other Analytics Tools on Kinsta
Bots and Analytics Inconsistency
What is the definition of a visit?
Kinsta keeps track of how many people visit your WordPress site directly from the web server. In the MyKinsta analytics “Resource Usage” report, you may obtain a summary of the visitors and filter it by the last 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
The graph is completely interactive and includes drill-down details. If you select a certain point in time on the graph, for example, it will provide some comparison facts, such as the overall number of visits being higher than the previous day, and so on.
In terms of analytics, all log data is kept for 30 days. If you’re concerned about exceeding your plan’s visit limit, after migrating to Kinsta, check the dashboard and statistics area more frequently. Let our team know if you see an inexplicable traffic surge or discrepancy, and we’ll look into the records for you to assist establish the source.
What Triggers and Doesn’t Trigger a Visit?
Here are some samples of what does and does not prompt a visit to Kinsta:
This is a visit when a human comes to your site and loads the page.
When a human visits your site and then navigates to another page, it is still counted as one visit.
Because the IP address is the same, when a human visits your site from two separate browsers, it is treated as one visit.
When a human visits your site from home and then later from work, they are listed as two different visitors because they utilized two different IP addresses to access the site. This also means that every visit from a specific place in a given day will only be counted once, regardless of how many devices were used to load your site from that area, as long as the visitor utilizes the same internet connection.
Visitor Counts and Other Analytics Tools on Kinsta
It’s vital to keep in mind that third-party analytics programs may produce results that differ from what we estimated. This is because each analytics tool utilizes a different collection of data as the foundation for their calculations and may or may not employ their own logic to try to show you the total number of real human visitors after bots and crawlers have been filtered out.
Based on the data they’ve gathered and their own set of guidelines — what they consider irrelevant bot traffic and what they consider legitimate traffic — each tool displays a different number.
Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to track
Google Analytics collects data by embedding JavaScript on your site, which runs in each visitor’s browser. This can either be done manually or with the help of a Google Analytics WordPress plugin. It uses data gathered from visitor browsers to compute the number of users and sessions. By screening out bots and tracking visits across devices and network changes (such as when a visitor’s IP changes), Google Analytics is meant to show you just human visitors.
According to PageFair, ad blockers were used by up to 30% of internet users in 2017, and the figure is continuing to rise. The analytics JavaScript library is blocked from sending data back to Google’s servers by most ad blockers, which blacklist www.google-analytics.com. Those that don’t automatically ban Google Analytics nonetheless allow you to do so with a single click.
This means that Google Analytics won’t be able to count visitors who use ad blockers in most cases. However, because we are looking at visits to the server, these visits are still counted at Kinsta.
Google Analytics generates no value that is directly equivalent to our visit count. We don’t advocate basing your estimate of monthly visits on Google Analytics statistics.
Analytics from Cloudflare
Cloudflare Analytics gives you information on how many people have visited your site. Simply log in to your Cloudflare dashboard and select “Analytics” from the drop-down menu.
Analytics from Cloudflare
Cloudflare displays unique visitors for the time period you specify. If you select a weekly view, the data points will indicate daily uniques, but the weekly visitor count at the top of the chart will show unique visitors for the entire week, regardless of how many times they visited the domain on a daily basis.
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Visitor count on Cloudflare
To accurately compare Cloudflare’s and Kinsta’s traffic, you can either sum up the daily visitors separately or choose a single day as the average and multiply it. Let’s have a look at the image above as an example. When the daily visitors are added together (70k + 60k + 60k + 55k + 62k + 105k + 80k), the total is 492,000. This is how you can generate a total that looks more like what you see in Kinsta. Although our stats aren’t greater than Cloudflare’s, we do employ a different way of calculation.
How to Set Up Cloudflare APO for WordPress is a recommended read.
Statistics on the server
There are a plethora of alternative server statistics programs on the market nowadays, one of which may be put on your existing server. If you have access to statistics on your present server, you should be able to find data that will allow you to estimate visits with a high degree of precision.
The key is to understand how your current server’s server statistics package counts visits and how that relates to how Kinsta counts visits.
In this article, we’ve already explained how we count visits. You may also need to do some study to figure out how your existing server’s statistics package counts visits. After that, you’ll be able to use the analytics from your existing server to make an educated guess about how visitors will behave on our platform.
Many web hosts that use cPanel provide AWStats as part of their package. If you have access to AWStats, their “visits” count is identical to our visits calculation and should give you a good idea of how many visitors you’ll get when sizing a hosting package.
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Log into cPanel and select “Awstats” from the “Metrics” area to find this information.
WStats in cPanel
In the “Number of visits” column, look for the total.
Visits to AWStats
Bots and Discrepancy in Analytics
Bots and Analytics Discrepancy When a bot hits your site, it may or may not be recorded as a visit.
We try our utmost to filter out visits from well-known “bot” user-agents and do not count them in our analytics data. API calls, search engine crawlers, uptime bots, and so on are all included. We block anything that tries to brute force “wp-login.php” from our infrastructure.
Bots have been known to spoof user agents, in which case they may seem valid in our access logs but not in Google Analytics or other programs that rely on the visitor’s browser running JavaScript. As a result, there may be a disparity between the total visits we report and the total visits shown by another tool, especially if that tool relies on JavaScript running in the browser.
Because bot traffic necessitates server resources (RAM/CPU/bandwidth), certain bots may be counted among your total visits because our servers must still service those visitors. As a courtesy, we reject correctly detected bot traffic, however bot traffic requires just as much labor from our servers as human traffic.
We recommend using a web application firewall (WAF) from a reliable security solution provider like Cloudflare or Sucuri if you’re having trouble with a huge disparity or a lot of bot traffic. These services have large databases of what should be considered “bad” traffic and traffic from these IP addresses is never allowed to reach your Kinsta site. After using one of these services, many of our clients notice a significant reduction in the disparity between our analytics and what Google Analytics and other tools indicate. As a result, you can save money by reducing the size of the hosting package required for your website.
Our Kinsta support team can additionally implement additional IP or User-Agent banning rules. For example, if you need to ban a specific User-Agent or IP address from your site, simply share that information with our support team, who will create a rule to prevent that traffic source. Because of the nature of our system, this should be done at the server level rather than through a WordPress plugin. If you require assistance, please submit a ticket.
Summary
In conclusion, every analytics program or package uses its own data set and calculation methodology to generate analytics. Kinsta’s visit count is based on raw access logs that track the IP addresses that request resources from your website, excluding known bots.
We cannot guarantee a perfect match between our analytics and those created by another software because each program uses its own data and methodology. If you have access to another analytics application that counts unique user IP addresses using server access logs (such as Cloudflare or AWStats), you can use that information to estimate how many visits your site will receive while hosted at Kinsta.
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