Support Manual

Awstats

Located under Web/FTP Stats in cPanel, Awstats is one of the means of tracking statistics related to your site. You can find out who has recently visited your site, bandwidth usage, and other useful information. When you click on Awstats, a variety of information will be at your disposal, but the key to using this information to your advantage is knowing how to interpret each item. Below is a list of definitions for terms that are displayed in Awstats.

Last Update: The last time your statistics were updated. To update your stats, click on the “update now” tab.

Reported Period: If you wish to grab statistics from a specific window of time, select parameters such as yearly or monthly to grab data organized by particular time frames.

Summary: Awstats displays a table that lists the visits to your website during a certain period of time. There are two rows: traffic viewed and traffic not viewed. Traffic viewed stands for visits registered from regular viewers, which essentially represent real people. Traffic not viewed represents search robots, crawl bots, or special HTTP status codes (pages that were not found). The bots, while not real people, are useful for obtaining information about your page and making it available to search engines.

Unique Visitors: An IP Address is an ID attached to a specific internet connection. Different IPs represent different users that have visited your website.

Number of Visits: You can obtain the total number of visits to your site. Understand that this is tied to every time a page loads, not unique users. That means if I am at your home page and refresh the page five times, it will record that the page was visited five times. There is a visits to visitor ratio that can be used as a way of determining how many actual people are visiting your website.

Pages: The number of different pages that were opened on your website from your visisted.

Hits: Number of accessed files that were recorded for your page. If your page accesses multiple documents, it will generate a number of hits equal to the amount of documents.

Bandwidth: Every page and file on your website uses up bandwidth. Think of bandwidth as having a filing cabinet with various files and documents, only certain documents take up more space than others. The space is often described in Bytes (b), Kilobytes (kb), Megabytes (mb), and Gigabytes (GB).

1,000 bytes = 1 kb

1,000 kb = 1 mb

1,000 mb = 1 gb

The total amount of bandwidth used is listed on this page. The average amount of data each visitor downloads is also listed as a convenient way of understanding the amount of traffic and load your website is bearing.

You can break up access times by hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly windows. This can be useful in determining when your website is accessed the most, giving more insight into the type of visitor coming to your webpage.

Countries: Where do your visitors come from? This tool lists the top 25 countries from which users access your website. By clicking “Full List,” every country of origin will be displayed.

Hosts: Displays a table of hostnames and IP addresses that access your site. You can block IP addresses or a particular network if they are maliciously attacking your website or accessing your files illegitimately. This is useful for preventing unwanted access and Denial of Service attacks.

Authenticated Users: Lists the number of users who have accessed your password protected directories.

Robots/Spiders Visitor: Listed bots that have indexed your website for search engines. Visits Duration: The average amount of time people spend visiting your website.

File types: A list of the most accessed file types.

Pages-URL: Displays a list of pages on your website with the most viewed displayed at the top.

Operating systems: Displays the amount of people and what operating system they were using when visiting your website.

Browsers: Shows a list of browsers that were used to visit your page, which is extremely useful if you want to be accessed by a variety of users. Each browser interprets HTML, CSS, and various codes differently which means that how your page looks in Firefox may be different in a browser like Explorer or Safari. If a function on your website is seen by Firefox users but not by Explorer users, this may prove problematic when trying to reach a target audience.

Connect to a site from: Sometimes other people may link to your website. This section displays where the link originated from and who is referring users to your site. This is key to discovering how people learn about you and how you might expand your user base.

Search Keyphrases and Search Keywords: Keyphrases and keywords that are set in various web pages on your site and how they have been scanned by search engines.

HTTP Error Codes: A list of the HTTP error messages people have received. If there is a problem with your website – this is a good way of finding out which page is having difficulties. If someone visits a non-existent page on your website however, it will add to this number.

 

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