SITE AGE

The site was launched 29th October 1999, and reached 1 million hits on the Bridge (homepage) in May 2006 (not sure of precise date as was away throughout that month). There is a light-hearted page for "the 1 millionth visitor" - see Site Section 13. Hits exclude a total of 46 days when the hit counter was offline due to faults with previous webhosts. Those webhosts provided free webhosting.

From 29th September 2004, I started to pay for a Bravenet counter in order to attain online reliability and to exclude my own hits from the hit statistics. The Bravenet hit counter remained continually online since then until 23rd August 2006 when I decided to stop having a hit counter for the following reasons:

• Since October 2003, when the site underwent major restructuring, the Bridge was hosted by Freeserve (the company was taken over by Wanadoo then by Orange), and hits on the Bridge (home page), which contained just the index page and supporting administrative files, bore little relation to the hits on www.star-trek-voyager.net and www.star-trek-voyager.org which contain the site's content (main content and mostly games & puzzles respectively). The latter two's webhosts provide detailed statistics as part of the paid service. .net has consistently shown just over 1 million hits per month. (That is not really that many, considering there were, at the time, over 3,000 site pages. Now there are over 4,000 site pages.)
• After navigation improvements, whereby visitors can access the main site sections from within each other, the hits on the Bridge dropped noticeably from 18,000 per month to about 9,000 per month, not allowing for seasonal variations. Correspondingly, webhost statistics showed more visitors not entering the site at the Bridge but at, say, the Ship's Log Season Index pages (the Episode Guides section is the most visited part of the site).
• Cost: as the hit statistics on the content part of the site, as distinct from the Bridge, have remained more or less the same, I see no reason to pay for another year's counter hosting, especially when.....see below.
• The webhosts for the actual content of my site provide detailed statistics and these statistics are overall more useful than those for my Bridge. They specify, for instance, which pages have been hit and when, and the page where from. They also give me a picture of which browsers and browser versions are used.

Information about the site hits:

• Between 29th October 1999 and 29th September 2004 the hit counter (whoever it was hosted with at particular times) has been offline for a total of 46 days. I cannot really guess how many hits occurred while it was offline and the counter resumed with the number it had when it went offline.
• Since 29th September 2004, the hit counter has excluded my own hits.
• The Bravenet hit counter (which is a paid-for one) has had a 100% rate of reliability, having been online continuously since 29th September 2004 until I stopped the service.
• Approximately 22 hits per month are classified as "unknown" and I am told by Web gurus that these are web-bots crawling or spidering my site for various search engine indexes. My own search engine host may well carry out an additional number near to that if I am particularly productive in a month because I re-index my site after major changes.
• January is the busiest month. July into August is the quietest.
• The busiest times are 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), which encompasses end-of-school time for Britons and evening in the USA.
• Hits used to average 20,000 per month on the home page index page, with well over 1 million hits per month on the site's actual content. Hits are gradually reducing as time goes on because the show ended 23rd May 2001 (which is when the finale first aired in the USA). I expect hits to go on reducing gradually, but if hits really plummet from 1 million a month, I shall consider closing the site, also of course taking into account any separate personal circumstances of myself and my family.