iPage is the web hosting service I use for this blog. Each month they send me usage statistics generated through their hosting control panel and analytics modules. A “visit” represents a single session of activity from a unique visitor until the visitor leaves or remains idle for roughly 30 minutes.

Over the last few month the number of visits to this site have increased substantially to nearly 7,000 per day and I have no idea why. In the last year, the number of visits was more than 1.2 million which is hard for me to wrap my head around given my target audience is just friends and family.

After further investigation, I learned that for hobby-level websites like mine, it is common for between 30% to 80% of all visits to be from automated bots or scrapers. I wonder if the recent increase in daily activity is linked in some way to the increased use of AI.

Regardless, it is nice to know that more than a few people take a moment each day to visit and this serves to motivate me to keep posting.