hits or unique visitors?
the stats available to me define a 'hit' as the transfer of any file. A web page with 2 graphics in it would create 3 hits. (but not always since the browser can cache the graphics and not request them)
I just looked at last month's hits and I had a little over 8 million hits but I have a lot of small graphics being used...

(this is going to be changed at some point when I have time to work on my own site) LoL