Website hosting report: "Number of requests" vs "Number of page requests."

Factual Questions
1

I’ve got a modest website hosted by GoDaddy. They provide me with a wealth of statistics about activity on my site. Most of the information is overkill, IMO, but no matter. What really concerns me is how many visitors went to the site on a given day. I don’t care if they looked at one page and left, or rooted around to every page on the site.

The report provides a day-by-day breakdown with two columns titled “Number of requests” and **“Number of page requests.” ** Sometimes the numbers in both columns are the same, and sometimes the “requests” are more numerous than the “page requests”; the “page requests” are never more numerous than the “requests.”

What do these numbers mean exactly? There is a little explanation at the top of the chart that says: *“The Daily Report identifies the activity for each day within the reporting period. Remember that one page hit can result in several server requests as the images for each page are loaded.” *

Okay, but Huh?

What I want to know is how many visitors came to the site. Do either of these numbers tell me that? If not, where in the report would I find it?

Thanks all. in advance.

(And yes, I intend to install a visitor counter soon.)

2

Totally uneducated guess: page requests are those where a full html webpage is loaded in a browser, whereas requests would include a single file download, perhaps due to someone hotlinking to one of the images on your site or something similar.

But that’s just a guess.

3

ding ding

Requests occur each time the server is asked to serve up a file. One html page with six images and one attached style sheet will return 8 requests every time it is loaded, for example.