Why does my hit counter do this?

Every once in a while, my hit counter will go gonzo, like this:

Counter History for last 10 recorded days Session - Total

05/06/2015 4 - 21
05/05/2015 2887 - 3426
05/04/2015 77 - 478
05/03/2015 58 - 493
05/02/2015 66 - 607
05/01/2015 92 - 512
04/30/2015 63 - 297
04/29/2015 61 - 255
04/28/2015 78 - 357
04/27/2015 83 - 521

Why is that. Is it recording something crawling me?

Thanks,
Phil

Basically yes, it is recording the number of sessions that were generated by someone/something repeatedly trying to access your site.

The why? Ehh, to do so basically. Could be for any reason.

When you say "trying to access" do you mean 'trying and not succeeding' or do mean 'hitting it again and again just for giggles'? There are no errors in my log file.

BTW Things have returned to normal. There was just the one blurp (technical term :smile:).

Phil Soth:

When you say "trying to access" do you mean 'trying and not succeeding' or do mean 'hitting it again and again just for giggles'? There are no errors in my log file.

BTW Things have returned to normal. There was just the one blurp (technical term :smile:).

Regarding: 'trying and not succeeding' is somewhat "relative". Depends on what constitutes success on the attempters side... Were they successful at fully taking down your site for all time? Obviously not otherwise the thread would be completely different. Were they successful at reaching some portion of your site? Obviously in some fashion... Did they prove that they could write some sort of spider script? Maybe... Just to see if they could do it? (For giggles) also maybe...

That lack of error messages is a good thing, generally means at least everything could keep up with the demand... All that said, I tend to go back and verify what I can when I see that kind of activity just to see that all the "facts" line up and some new yet unknown vector hasn't been discovered or any other issue. Just to be on the safe/defensive side.

Thanks for the quick reply! What other things can I do to "...go back and verify what I can when I see that kind of activity just to see that all the "facts" line up and some new yet unknown vector hasn't been discovered or any other issue..."?

There are also some spiders that do not identify themselves correctly in the User Agent such as:
##########spider

and it does not flag as a spider because of this so it counts on the hits ...