I'm pretty sure the counter is broken.
Two days ago I was surprised that the hit count was 1.7 million, when I had previously seen it only approaching 1.2 million. If it took 6 years for the first million, another half million in any short amount of time was exciting, but I was soon suspicious when I could find no evidence of an actual hit increase. Any graph of traffic showed things as normal this past week.
So at some point I'll have to find out why the counter's behaviour changed, and see if I can get a new one or fix that one, and just assume that we've had about 1.2 million hits about now, not 2 million, and hopefully be able to start it at that point rather than zero.
Not that anyone cares about hits but me.