Recently I looked at our traffic numbers* and saw something that surprises a lot of people:
Cloudflare reported 7.5 million requests in 30 days
Matomo reported about 300 real visits and ~1,000 human actions
That sounds contradictory — but it isn’t.
The vast majority of traffic on today’s internet is automated. Bots constantly scan websites looking for vulnerabilities, outdated software, exposed admin panels, email addresses, and anything else they can harvest. Search engine crawlers and various monitoring systems also generate requests.
Those automated requests show up in raw “hit” counts.
They are not real visitors.
This is why proper website configuration matters:
A firewall and bot filtering system block or challenge unwanted traffic.
Caching serves static content without hitting the server.
Analytics tools measure real human engagement instead of background noise.
If you size hosting or judge site popularity based on unfiltered request numbers, you’ll get a completely distorted picture. In our case, the difference between total requests and real human interaction is roughly 7,500 to 1.
What matters isn’t raw hits.
What matters is real users.
Proper configuration ensures the server is built for actual visitors — not the constant automated scanning that every public website receives.
In our case, it’s the difference between provisioning an enterprise-grade dedicated or cloud infrastructure that could cost $10,000 per month to accommodate raw request volume, versus running on a modest setup that costs around $10 per year to serve the site’s actual human visitors.
* Cloudflare is a global web infrastructure company that sits between visitors and our website’s server. It acts as a reverse proxy, meaning all traffic passes through Cloudflare’s network before reaching our origin server. Matomo is a web analytics platform that measures how real visitors use a website. It is an alternative to Google Analytics, but it is designed with data ownership and privacy control in mind. Where Cloudflare handles traffic at the network level, Matomo measures human behavior at the application level.