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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:
- 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.
- Error log - stores data about errors generated by the
server (e.g. Page Not Found error) or by your CGI scripts;
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 be available both in Unix and Windows hosted accounts. It generates web, ftp or mail server
statistics into graphical web pages. AWStats statistics for your domain is available in your browser at
http://<your_domain>/cgi-bin/awstats.pl
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. It is available only for Linux hosted accounts.
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/.
ModLogAn
ModLogAn is another free statistics
package included into H-Sphere installation. It is available only for Linux hosted accounts.
You can see Modlogan statistics for your domain in your browser at
http://<your_domain>/modlogan/.
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