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Moving this to the PHP forum, even though it'll be SQL stuff for a bit. By website hits are you talking about something other than this download stuff? Then yes, you would have two separate tables for the two separate events. For the counter, don't use an actual counter in the database. Track individual downloads instead. You can get a counter by doing a count of matching records in the table - don't worry, it's fast. Also means you can do more than just total downloads, like downloads per month. Because as a rule of thumb, Data Is Good. Get as much as you can. I don't mean tracking users or anything sketchy like that. I mean, if you have information (like a download happening) then you should store everything you can about it. Even if it doesn't seem useful now. Because if you decide later that, say, you'd like to get an overview of where in the world people are downloading your stuff, you can't go back in time and fill in data for event that have already happened. So for downloads, create a table with: 1. An AUTO_INCREMENTing ID, because these sorts of things are handy to have around 2. The name of the downloaded file 3. The DATETIME of the download 4. The visitor's IP address, which can also help you deal with abuse problems (that hopefully won't happen) For best performance, create a UNIQUE index on the filename. You can also create a regular INDEX on the filename and the download time (both fields), which will allow you to run fast queries when looking at both fields in the same query. Tracking website hits will look very similar to that. If you want a counter for a specific file, and just that file, you do a query to SELECT COUNT(1) from the downloads table WHERE the name of the file is whatever file you want to check. But more often you'll want counters for all files, in which case you can do one query to get all of them at once by SELECTing the name of the file with its COUNT(1) and having the query GROUP BY the file name; pull that information out into a PHP array and you can reference it when creating your HTML markup.