Hit counters have been around since the beginning of the world wide web. An IP based hit counter goes much further than a simple hit counter. This kind of hit counter will theoretically only register one hit per visitor.

A simple hit counter is not very useful. It does a very poor job of counting the number of visitors to your website. Every time the same visitor visits your website, the hit counter is increased by one. That's not the part to be concerned about. If that same visitor hits the refresh button on their web browser over and over again, your hit counter will keep adding one to the total. For this reason, a hit counter is a poor indicator of the number of people who have visited your web page. Fortunately, there is an alternative.

What is an IP?

IP stands for Internet Protocol. Think of it like a phone number. When you want to call someone, you dial their phone number to reach them. Everyone gets a unique phone number. If they weren't all unique telephones would quickly loose their usefullness. An IP does the same thing for your computer. In order for your computer to talk to other computers over the internet, it must be assigned a unique number. This makes an IP the perfect thing to track a visitor to your website.

Why an IP Based Hit Counter?

A hit counter that is IP based will only register one visit per visitor. If a visitor to your website were to hit refresh over and over again, a php based ip hit counter would still only register the one visit. This results in a much more accurate count of the number of visitors to your website.

Is an IP Based Hit Counter foolproof?

Nothing is foolproof. While tracking a visitor by their IP address will allow you to only register the one hit per visit, you cannot assume that your current hit count represents unique visitors. The main reason is that a person's IP address can change from one day to the other. If that person is accessing your website from a dial-up account, it can change every time they log in. The only thing you can usually safely assume is that a visitor's IP address will prevent them from being counted more than once in one session.

Where can I get one?

This Hit counter by Mustals should do the trick – http://www.mustalweb.co.uk/download/

An IP Based Hit Counter is definitely better than just a simple hit counter but it has it's limitations. Hit counters in general will only be useful to give you a very rudimentary understand of the traffic hitting your website. More advanced web statistics can tell you a lot more about your visitor than a php ip hit counter will. Understanding these limitations though, can make a hit counter a useful part of your website.