Let us start by looking at the second question. When analyzing numbers related to the growth of a website, I normally recommend looking at them on a logarithmic scale. The reason is that the Web and the Internet both experience exponential growth . Therefore, Web statistics are better analyzed in terms of growth rates than in terms of linear growth. Admittedly, the Web's growth has slowed down since the phenomenal pace we experienced in 1993 and 1994, but it still doubles in size every year.
New sites go live, new users come online, and traffic keeps climbing.
The diagram shows the reported traffic stats plotted with a logarithmic scale on the y -axis. With a logarithmic scale, an exponential growth curve shows as a straight line, and the best-fit growth curve has been added to the figure in red. Since we are not looking for scientific truth, we can relax our requirements somewhat and conclude that the odds are in favor of slight growth. The main reason to study Web growth is to plan server capacity and future business models . To do so, we need to know not just the most likely growth of the site, but also the possible range of growth.