It might also be worth pointing out that some webhost setups, like cPanel, feature some fairly basic reporting. The one in cPanel I'm thinking of is called Webalizer

If this is enabled, you can get some rough statistics, extracted from the raw access logs.

In Webalizer reports, there is a yellow column for 'visits' - it's this one I will refer to (if I don't have GA on the site), as it's the closest number representing actual unique visits to the site (something like the same IP address within a 30 minute period).

I'd take those numbers, perhaps reduce them by a third (for bots, spiders, etc) and then present them with a very large serving of salt.