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How do I view my sites statistics and what do they mean?

Login to your control panel at http://www.example.com/admin/ (replace example.com with your domain name) and click on 'statistics'. From there, you can choose to view your bandwidth (total amount of data transferred per month), disk usage or the Webalizer statistics.

All the requests for files from your site are logged. Every day we compile these logs into a detailed traffic report. This report can be found by clicking on 'Webalizer'. Below are explanations of some of the key headings that you will encounter when looking at your sites statistics.

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 guide 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, remote 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 transferred between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.

Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your account.

Search Strings are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various search engines.

User Agents are another name for browsers e.g. Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc.. are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server.

Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the 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.

Response Codes are defined as part of 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.

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