How to use Webalizer for Visitor Statistics #
Your hosting account includes Webalizer website statistics. You can access it by following the directions below:
- Log in to your DirectAdmin control panel by accessing https://yourdomain:2222
- Click on the Site Summary Statistics & Logs button (under System Info & Files)
- Click on your domain name link, then click the View Stats button
- 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 already in the browser’s cache.
- Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors: the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they have already cached (viewed).
- 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 multiple IP addresses, so it should be used only as a rough gauge of the number of visitors to your server.
- Visits occur when a remote site requests a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, all requests will be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server and the time since the last request exceeds the specified timeout period (default: 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remote sites that link to graphics and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.
- Pages are the URLs that correspond to the actual page being requested, not to the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions, and it defaults to URLs with extensions .htm, .html, or .cgi.
- A KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transferred between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.Common Definitions
- A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to your server and is identified by its IP address or hostname.
- URL – Uniform Resource Locator. All requests to a web server must include a URL. A URL is a string that represents an object on your server that is accessible to a remote user, or that results in an error (e.g., 404 – Not Found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc.).
- Referrers are URLs that lead users to your site or cause the browser to request resources from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page.
- Search Strings are obtained by examining the referrer string and identifying known patterns across various search engines. The search engines and the patterns to look for can be specified by the user within a configuration file. The default will catch most of the major ones.
- Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.
- User Agents are a fancy name for browsers. Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc., are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Keep in mind, however, that many browsers allow the user to change their reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.
- Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.
- Entry/Exit pages are the pages that were first requested during a visit (Entry) and last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was is counted as an Exit page.
- Countries are determined based on the top-level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable, however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the US or somewhere else. An.IL domain may actually be in Israel; however, it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are. COM (US Commercial) and .NET (Network).ORG (Non-profit Organization) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a significant share of dial-up and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as IP addresses.
- Response Codes are defined in the HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC 2068; see Chapter 10). These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it.
