In the street with my laptop

Statistics: Monthly and yearly visitors, viewed pages and downloads.

Monthly statistics.

 December
2022
January
2023
February
2023
Unique visitors  6,567  7,473  1,817
Total visits  9,249 15,635  2,274
Visits 15min+  1,736  2,308     132
Total pages viewed15,04021,410  4,352
FPC sources download  1,196     760  1,120
FPC executables download     802     332     923
Personal articles download     136      99      92

Yearly statistics.

 Total
2020
Total
2021
Total
2022
Unique visitors   9,316   8,49720,056
Total visits13,89210,70326,524
Visits 15min+   1,020     350  2,377
Total pages viewed34,75223,55549,534
FPC sources download   8,122   7,12910,621
FPC executables download   6,185   5,629   7,935
Personal articles download     637     794   1,287
 

Statistics based on counts done by awstats statistics web application.
The lower visits numbers for 2021 and in paticular the lower number of pages and visits 15min+ are very probably due to the fact that AnimalDB has been taken offline end 2020. Also, I think that awstats does not work correctly on my VPS, failing to update the statistics on Saturdays and the last day of the month.
The unnormally high visitors/visits numbers for December 2022 (and thereby for the year 2022) and January 2023 are diffcult to interprete. awstats reports over 8,700 accesses to AnimalDB on 26.12 and over 5000 resp over 8000 on 11.01 and 12.01. Was this the trial of an attack against my VPS? Something wrong with awstats? Or just something that sometimes happens, without that there is any reasonable explanation?