One of the limits InfinityFree enforces is the “hits” limit. This article explains what a hit is, how you can control your hits usage and what happens if you exceed the limit.
What is a hit?
A hit is a simply request to a file on your website, which can be a HTML or PHP page, an image, a CSS file or something else.
A hit is not the same as a page view, visit or visitor. Visitor can visit your website multiple times, a visit can include multiple page views, and a single page view can include multiple hits.
If a visitor loads a single page which has two CSS files, three Javascript files and five images, that will generate a total of 11 hits to load that page. If your website code makes any requests to your website in the background (like with a chat script), these requests count towards your hits usage as well.
How much hits do I have?
InfinityFree enforces a limit of 50,000 hits in a single day. Your hits usage counter is reset every 24 hours, but not necessarily at midnight.
If you reach 50,000 hits in a single day, your account will be taken offline for 24 hours. After 24 hours, your account will be reactivated automatically.
Additionally, if your website continuously gets a lot of traffic and uses many hits, we may ask you to upgrade as well.
Why do my analytics tool show much lower numbers?
Analytics tools, like Google Analytics, are a great way to see how people interact with your website. They can tell you who visited your website, where they came from, what pages they viewed, in which sequence they viewed them and how long they viewed them.
But analytics tools work by including some Javascript code in the web page. This has a few consequences:
- Browsers with ad blocking or tracking blocking features may block the analytics code, which means they will not show up in the statistics.
- Analytics tools can only track page views, visits and visitors. They cannot record how many requests a browser needs to do to render that page.
Because of that, analytics tools always report lower numbers than your hits usage. That’s because analytics tools measure different things, and can’t measure everything.
Why is my hits usage so high?
There are various reasons why your hits usage was so high. For example:
- Your website received a lot of page views.
- Your website has a lot of additional files which need to be loaded to render a page.
- Your website received a (D)DoS attack.
How do I reduce my hits usage?
Here are some recommendations to help reduce your hits usage (and make your website load faster in the process):
- Remove unnecessary Javascript and CSS files from your pages.
- Leverage browser caching to reduce the number of hits for subsequent page views.
- Combine Javascript and CSS files to single files.
- Enable a caching service like Cloudflare on your website to reduce requests to static files.
How do I increase my allowed hits?
The hits allocation on free hosting cannot be increased upon request. We treat all accounts equally, and will not give people unfair benefits just because they ask for it.
If your hits usage is still too high after following the recommendations here (or you are having trouble applying the tips to your website), please consider upgrading your account to premium hosting.
With premium hosting, there is no limit on how many hits your website can get. All the other resource limits are far more generous as well, so your website can continue to grow. Add to that the other great features of premium hosting, like automatic free SSL certificates, Cloudflare RailGun and an award winning cloud hosting platform, and you can be sure your website will stay fast and reliable!