24 hours after publishing my website the hit counter showed 79. I had only given the URL to one person who looked at it twice.
Doubt anyone could have found it by chance as it is one for a club
www.vets4510.bravehost.com
One of the biggest turn-offs to this site was their site counter. Everyone has access to your statistics and if you want to remove this, you have to pay. This got me to looking further into counters.
BTW, I assume that you only put the counter on one page. If on other pages also, it will count everytime someone looks at a page.
Go to statcounter.com. Its a much more profesional looking counter.