webalizer

[WILKO92]

What should I be reading into the webalizer usage statistics that I retrieve.


It tells me that so far during September I have had 4871 hits, 25 visits, and 15 sites. What does it all mean?

Since getting online last week, as far as I am aware the only users have been myself and others that I have given test orders for. I certainly havn't had any other evidence of outsiders finding me.

[pinbrook]

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).

Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many ip addresses so it should be used simply as a rough guage as to the number of visitors to your server.

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions, and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.

A KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transfered between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.


source http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/webalizer_help.html

more useful info
http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/simpleton.html

[wjcampbe]

The 4871 is the total number of web pages, plus image files contained within each of the pages, plus the perl/cgi scripts called by the page, plus the css and javascript files used by the pages. Your second figure 25, should be the number of html pages, and the third figure 15, should be the total number of visitors, including repeat visits by the same user (eg could be yourself 9 times and one other person twice and 4 more one time each).

When you connect to your site with ftp, do you see a folder called /logs/ with some .gz files in it? There should be some starting with access and some with ftp - these are raw logs which you can use with other packages to get more detailed information about your visitors and what they do on your site.

There are a lot of these programmes available and once again, you have to try a few and see what you are comfortable with. I have one I am trialling now that I have so far found to be very good except it was not able to read the files on my website, I had to download them to my hard drive, then it worked just fine.

[WILKO92]

Many thanks, a bit more learnt!