Depending on your hosting plan, your account may
include different tools to track and report your website statistics. This document
discusses:
Understanding Website Statistics
Information about the operation of your site is critical for decision-making.
To obtain this information, you need to analyze statistical data that is written
to log files in your home directory on the server:
- Error log - stores data about errors generated by the server (e.g. Page Not
Found error) or by your CGI scripts;
- Transfer log - stores combined data about every visit to your site, including:
- Remote host IP (i.e. visitor's IP);
- Time of request (i.e. when visitor requested the page);
- First line of request;
- Error generated by request, if any;
- Size of message sent in response to the request;
- Referrer (i.e. from which page visitor was directed);
- Agent ID (i.e. type of browser or another agent and related information, such
as user's OS, etc.) ;
- Referrer log - stores the list of URLs from which visitors are referred to
your site; and
- Agent log - stores data about agents used to enter the site -- such as browsers
or any other Internet-based software -- and all related data.
These are called raw logs which processed to obtain readable information,
usually in the form of tables and charts. So, to start with your website statistics,
check if stats logging is enabled.
Enabling Stats Logging
To enable or disable writing to log files:
- Click the Web Options icon on your control panel home page
- Select the Domain name you need
- On the page that shows, scroll down to the Settings section and click
the ON/OFF icon next to the log files.
Viewing Raw Logs
Raw logs are difficult to read, but luckily you don't need to do this. However,
if you need to take a look at the logfile records:
- Click the Web Options icon on your control panel home page.
- Choose the necessary domain
- Scroll down to Log files and click the View icon next to it.
- List of log files shows.
- Click the necessary file and all its records will show.
Note: Entering end in the Line Number field will show a
list of records from the tail of a logfile.
Log Analyzers
Log analyzers parse raw logs to produce visual reports in HTML format for
viewing through a browser.
To enable these analyzers and view statistics reports for your sites:
- Click the Stats icon to go to the Statistics page.
- Enable/disable the statistics package you want.
- Click the Apply link on the right of this domain.
- Click the View icon to go to the page of the statistics report.
This page is renewed once every 24 hours. Please wait till the next morning to
see the report to show up. The report must contain statistics since the raw logs
were enabled.
AWStats
AWStats is a free web analytics tool,
which can available both in Unix and Windows hosted accounts. It generates web,
ftp or mail server statistics into graphical web pages.
AWStats has a separate configuration file for each serviced domain. You can
find this file in your home directory <DOMAIN_NAME>/cgi-bin/awstats.<DOMAIN_NAME>.conf.
To protect your AWStats reports from unauthorized access, you need to configure
access rules for <DOMAIN_NAME>/cgi-bin/awstats.pl in the .htaccess
file as suggested in AWStats Security
Tips.
Webalizer
Webalizer is one of the most popular free statistics packages. Once you have
Webalizer enabled, it starts collecting your web statistics. You can see it in
your browser by going to http://<your_domain>/webalizer. Webalizer takes
24 hours after your new account or if you add a new domain to your account to
start displaying information.
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