You've found one of the best cheap web hosting services, set up your website, and sat back to watch the page hits roll in using a service like Google Analytics. But are those human visitors or spiders and bots?
That's right, not all visitors to your site are human. But how do you protect against this? Can you keep the best cheap web hosting service you've chosen, or do you need to get something a little more expensive?
Analytics: An Issue Itself
Whether you rely on Google Analytics or another web stats program to keep track of page visits, you need to know that you can't always trust the information is true. Although you'll see how many visits your site has received on top of all kinds of other nifty stats like bounce rate, conversions, visitor flow, and site performance, but one thing it can't tell you: whether those visits are humans or bots.
In fact, although there are many sites out there offering website monitoring and tracking tools that are essentially valuable to a website owner, these very tools are recorded as a page visit. That's right, each time you are tracking your stats and the program begins to analyze your website, that analytic program records the activity as a website visit despite the fact it is merely scanning your web pages.
The analytic programs are able to execute JavaScript, which means while they are cruising around collecting data and finding performance problems, your analytics data is going haywire. If you don't put your finger on these issues and put appropriate filters in place, your visitor data will be all out of whack.
Bots And Spiders
The first thing you should know: the majority of bots out there cannot execute JavaScript. As such, Google Analytics won't even be alerted to track the activity. It's a good thing, however, as it keeps the data from being recorded as actual visits.
You can filter out the bots to see a more accurate picture of the true numbers, but it isn't foolproof. Some malicious bots appear to be real human users unless you know what to look for. Typically, bots disguised as humans can be figured out by looking for an ungodly high number of page visits per user, strange page visit patterns, high bounce rates coupled with high page views with a small amount of time on the site, and requesting one specific page many, many times in a small amount of time.
What Can You Do?
Not much. Even the best cheap web hosting services will be vulnerable. Many webmasters are making the switch to protected web hosting companies, such as Rivalhost, over cheap web hosting services in an effort to stop this from happening.
But the bottom-line is: even the protected web hosting company can't totally protect you. However, it is true that when you make that switch from the best cheap web hosting service to protected web hosting, you'll see a considerable drop in your visitor numbers.
Although the best cheap web hosting services work well for businesses just starting out, as you acquire more and more daily visitors, you might want to consider upgrading to a protected web hosting company, so your site can handle all of the additional traffic it sees without crashing or slowing down. Your customers will thank you.
