I'd like to get some thoughts on this, if you please.

I run my website on webs.com and have a stats/visitors program that I check every couple of days.

Just went on and noticed that of 9 hits to my site this morning, 7 are from Singapore. No biggie. But the IP addresses are all nearly identical except for the last digit in the string. Seems weird. All these "visits" were during a span between 8:27am and 8:34am, and each has only one or two pages visited; all multi-tiered cake pics from my gallery.

Now, benefit of the doubt would be that someone in Singapore doesn't have a good internet connection and has to keep going on my site to look at photos in that particular section of my gallery. BUT with a different IP that only varies by one digit??

Or...I think I'm going to do some Singapore sleuthing.

Probably bots and spiders. They crawl across pages to index and categorize for future searching on Google, Yahoo, what have you. Or someone was checking out your site and bouncing their IP address off of somwhere foreign to hide their true identity. Competitor perhaps?

Okay super sleuth Jaime & now techno nerd, what the heck is bots & spiders?!? And how do you bounce you adress of another site to hide your identity?!?

I have not the first clue of what I speak. But bots and spiders are what go out into the internet world and read meta tags and keywords on websites, so that someone searches for something using one of those words, bam! Your website shows up.

Now as far as bouncing IP addresses, I know that is a doable thing, kind of hacker level techie stuff. I wouldn't know the first thing about it, and will testify to it in a court of law. Repeat, I know nothing of hacker stuff.... j/k. Seriously though, I really don't. Probably can find instructions on Google no doubt.

So, this may be the optimist in me, but what if there is a bride on a military base in Singapore that was browsing your site and had the other people on the "office" check it out as well. That would explain the one digit difference and the specific pages viewed.

How you hide your IP address is to use a proxy site. Some people have a program that does that automatically, if they're really big on privacy. Other people use a proxy if they want to get to a site that they're banned from or one that their IP doesn't let them access...for example if a kid at school wants to get on myspace they can use a proxy site and as long as the school doesn't have the proxy site blocked, they can access myspace but all the system administrators would see on the records is the proxy site. Another use for proxys is if you want to access something multiple times and make it look like it's coming from different places...voting for something, or flagging on Craigslist for example.

Here's a few proxys from Singapore http://www.freewebproxylist.com/SG_WebProxies.html
http://aliveproxy.com/proxy-list/proxies.aspx/Singapore-sg
But undoubtedly that's not all of them

Oooooh...at least half of that went over my head. But I did get half. Yeah, I'm just not that computer person. I do know how to get on-line though!

Hmmm...food for thought. I just don't know enough about IPs, other than each computer has one like a fingerprint. It just looked strange compared to the random visitor info I see usually.

Jamie, you are indeed the CC Supersleuth! Bots and spiders? Probably. I didn't think of that. Competitor? There many higher talent level decorators/designers besides me for someone to spy on! lol! Oh great. Now I have the Mission: Impossible theme song stuck in my brain.

Lol!!

Wow! This is all very interesting!

I'm thinking Jill might be right. The future bride probably emailed the link out and everyone in the office took a look.

That's what I did...