usage of websites

viney

Does any one know of a free prog or site where I can find out how busy a website is by typing in its uRL?

e.g. if I wanted to find out when site ABC was busy (so I can avoidit)

There used to be a site I had but lost the url and it would return something along the lines of between 1-2pm x users, 2-3pm y users, 3-4pm z users etc

thanks

John_Gray

The information about the number of users per hour is giving you only a small amount of information about 'busyness'.

Surely the busyness depends on how much work is done by the website? Consider if during one hour the only activity was that five people downloaded several lengthy movies each, but during the next hour what happened was that two thousand people visited the home page once then left. Which hour was the more busy, and during which hour are you likely to have got the best response?

buglawton

http://www.alexa.com will give you a rough idea of a site's popularity

johncalvin2

yes alexa.com will give you the rank of your site and most popular country used.

viney

John_Gray wrote: »

The information about the number of users per hour is giving you only a small amount of information about 'busyness'.

Surely the busyness depends on how much work is done by the website? Consider if during one hour the only activity was that five people downloaded several lengthy movies each, but during the next hour what happened was that two thousand people visited the home page once then left. Which hour was the more busy, and during which hour are you likely to have got the best response?

Thanks John very valid point. However, for my purposes I am only interested in the number of people rather than the work done by the site. I think Alexa as noted below looks quite useful. thank you all.

googler

compete.com

websitetrafficspy.com

are two that I've come across - the first seems to take its data from Alexa though, and I'm not convinced the second is accurate as it gave totally different results to the first when comparing a couple of sites.

tronator

There is no way a third party website could have accurate informations about it. Only the webserver who hosts the website knows exactly how many people accessed what page at what time.

However there is software like Google Analytics which can be installed on the website and which connects to Google every time someone visits the website. But if the visitor blocks Google Analytics the he will not be counted, but this will be a very minority of visitors.

Edit: This is how compete.com gets it's data

Based on the daily web usage of more than two million members (and growing!) of the Compete community, Compete calculates and estimates total traffic and rank for nearly every site on the web

googler

Thanks for that; if I'd spotted it, I would have known which one not to trust (Compete)