Please advise !

Hey guys, I'm new here and really desperate to find a solution to a problem.

My last webpage had some kind of trouble which I do not understand. I had the page for a little over a month but the stats climbed to over 100 000 hits, the reason why the stat numbers were important was that we were trying to reach a certain number within a limited time - legally of course. After a month, i started wondering whether i had contributed a great deal to the number on the site climbing up so...is it possible that a glitch could have caused my page to somehow refresh without my knowing ? I notice that sometimes when logging onto a page, something strange happens, the green light at the bottom right corner showing the loading progress of page rapidly flashes back and forth. Is it possible this rapid flashing meant the page was reloading each time it did that ?

Can someone please explain to me whether all counters accurately implement the number of times a page is viewed. If I visited my own page 20 times a day, looking at various articles I'd written, would the page counter go up ? I have another page where the counter does not go up all the time when i log on. If I click on my own page 10 times, whether to write a comment or see something, the most number of counts from myself shows to be 2 - 3 so I'm confused by how a counter would go to the 100 000s. What proof can be obtained to provide that aside from refreshing one's page a few times (if this can indeed raise the stats to over 100 000) it is not a machine-glitch etc etc. Is it possible for a machine, like my own computer to artificially inflate these page counters to such a high number ?

I've just been reading up a little on counters, do i need access to the raw server logs, would they be able to help regarding proof ?

I hope my question has been understood as I'm trying to find a way out of this and am completely confused by how the numbers could have gotten so high. I'd have to be clicking night, day and in between to garner such results in a month, and I didn't even have my laptop for 9 days of the month, so that's actually on 22 days I'm supposed to have caused such a large discrepancy. I'm really hoping to find that this was a malfunction of whatever system is in use and would appreciate anyone shedding any light.

many thanks and best regards

EDIT: I hope this is in the right forum

What you need is a good stats package, not just basic counters. They are to open to abuse and really don't give any accurate readings.

Something like Webalizer gives you hits, visits and unique visitors. You'd find that a lot more useful then just hits by itself. I'd ask your hosting company about it. Most have some form of stats package available.

Yeah look at your log files. Hit counters are a toy to be used only on personal pages for people that want to impress their friends that 1,209 people actually looked at their dog's "home page".

You should not make these things visible to visitors. It doesn't really impress.