Web Techs: whither stat loggers?

Factual Questions
1
      • Somebody at a smaller IT company I am interning at asked me how to log web stats for their site. Is there any way to do this off the server? I already knew of perl/cgi server logger scripts, but the company doesn’t maintain their own hardware server, they just rent web space with an ISP.
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2

Talk to the ISP. They have logs and can probably tell you what you need to know.

3

as chuck says, speak to the web hosting provider. they generally have raw log files as well as analyzers. you just have to get them to activate it for your specific hosting account. so tell them that you would like to activate the log analyzer option.

if they ask whether you want the raw log file (to do your own analysis) or whether you want the results of the log analyzer, say you’d rather have the results of the analyzer.

if they can’t seem to understand what you mean (my web hosting provider, for example), point them to this page:

http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/

and tell them this is what you’re looking for:

http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/sample/index.html

4

If they won’t do it, you can get a site counter from www.thecounter.com or other companies like it. It’s just a bit of javascript that sits on your web page and notifies them when your page gets hit. Then you go to their site to collect stats.

There are free counters and ones you pay a small amount for, which get you a ‘hidden’ counter and more complete logs.

5

Your ISP should provide the logs for free as part of your hosting arrangement. If they refuse to provide that information, you should find another host. Failing that, you can write your own logging utility in asp, perl, or any other server-side scripting language quickly and easily.

6
      • Is there any way to automatically log the IP names? Like run a whois on the URLs and log the result? The site is low-volume, they’re more interested in particular visitors/locations than overall stats… Maybe write something that runs through the log, I can do something in VB if it’s not too much of a beach.-?
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7

If you install a counter from Sitecounter.com or thecounter.com, you can get reports showing the IP addresses of the last few hits. On sitecounter it’s the last 30 hits.

A more valuable field for most web site admins is the referrer field, because this gives you a clue as to which other web sites are linking to yours. Following the referrer links back can tell you why people are coming to your site, what others are saying about you, etc. Very valuable.

IP addresses are typically not valuable, except for specialized purposes. For one thing, any one using a commercial service behind a firewall is going to be hidden to you anyway. Anyone using a dial-up account with a DHCP server will just have a random IP address assigned by the DHCP server, and those generally don’t tell you much.