Interpreting Weblog Statistics

Tracking visitors to your site used to require combing through cryptic logfiles, an often time-consuming and eye-straining task. Cape.Com provides an alternative with Weblogs, a graphical logfile analysis tool accessible from your web browser. Weblogs examines your logfiles for you and gives you statistics such as total visitors, pages viewed, visits by domain, and much more. An invaluable tool to effectively maintain and manage your site, Weblogs is easy to use and free to all subscribers. Recent enhancements include Agent, Referrer, and Keyword reports for all Virtually Hosted sites.

Definitions

The Different Access Logs

When you log in to view Weblogs, there may be up to 7 access logs available: virtuallog.html, weblog.html, detailed.virtuallog.html, detailed.weblog.html, agents.virtuallog.html, referrer.virtuallog.html, and, keywords.virtuallog.html. The virtuallog.html and detailed.virtuallog.html access logs display information about hits to your virtually hosted site (i.e. hits to www.yourdomain.com). The agents.virtuallog.html log displays information about the specific web browser and operating system of the visitor. The referrer.virtuallog.html log displays information about the specific URL or web site address that the visitor has come from. The keywords.virtuallog.html log displays the exact words that the visitor used when searching for your site. The weblog.html and detailed.weblog.html access logs display information about hits to your Basic FTP/Web site address (www.vsX.cape.com/~yourusername).

The following information is displayed by virtuallog.html and weblog.html:

• Long Term Statistics:
  • By month, the number of hits, visits, and bytes transferred, starting at the time that the transfers/log directory was created on your site.
  • The number of hits, visits, and bytes transferred, for the past five weeks, displayed by date, by day of week, and by hour of the day.
  • Record Book: this displays the largest number of hits, visits, and bytes transferred, and the date it happened.

• Statistics For The Current Month:(up to midnight the previous night)
  • Top 10 files by number of hits and by volume (bytes transferred)
  • Complete File Statistics: stats for each page on your site, when it was last accessed, number of hits on this page, and number of bytes transferred. Also, any error messages received; see below for descriptions of error messages.

  • Domain Statistics:
    • By top-level domains (such as .com, .net), the number of hits, bytes transferred, and when your site was last accessed
    • Top 10 domains by number of hits
    • Complete Domain Statistics: for each domain that has hit your site, this shows the host, when last accessed, number of hits, and number of bytes.

The following information is displayed by detailed.virtuallog.html and detailed.weblog.html :

• Long-Term Overview: (total number of log files analyzed, number of user sessions, and average length of user sessions).

• Detailed Access List: (for each date during the past five weeks)
  • A summary of how many pages were accessed by unique hosts, how many of these pages were viewed by Cape.Com or by outside domains, how many distinct "user sessions", and the average length of the user sessions, how many total hits, total errors, and how many bytes transferred.
  • Listed by top-level domain, then for each host in the domain, the time each session started, length of session, and the pages visited.
    

Error Messages

Here are some of the more common error messages you may see when viewing file statistics, and some reasons why you may have received these error messages.

• Code 200 Successful : The request was fulfilled successfully.

• Code 301 Moved Permanently: The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URL and any future references to this resource should be done using one of the returned URLs.

• Code 302 Moved Temporarily: The initial request was redirected to a different URL. This is considered to be a successful response.

• Code 304 Not Modified :The browser performs a conditional GET request and the file requested has not been modified since the date on the file in the browser's cache. This is the number of hits in which the browser's cache was used and is equivalent to Total Cached Hits.

• Code 401 Unauthorized The browser tries to request a file from a restricted directory and an invalid username/password was given.

• Code 403 Forbidden:Usually the result of file permissions that prevent the server from reading the file. If you have any of these you should check the permissions on your files.

• Code 404 File Not Found: A browser requests a filename that does not exist on the server.

• Code 500 Server Error:An error on the server, usually generated when a CGI script terminates abnormally or crashes.

• Code 501 Method Not Implemented: A CGI script may have been called incorrectly, perhaps with an incorrect path.

• Code 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable: The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overload. Server is out of resources. Please see the Other Questions section below for details related to this error.

See the Related Link below for more information on error messages.

Other Questions

• I'm seeing an unusual amount of activity on one particular file; what does this mean?

  Files that you submit to sites such as EBay can generate large numbers of hits; however, if the number of hits on a file seems unusual or excessive, it is possible that another site may be calling up a file or image of yours. Try changing the name of the file in question.

• I would like to keep more statistics than are available from Weblogs, or to keep detailed information from previous months.

  You can access the raw data in the access log files, and use a third-party program to analyze these logfiles. To do this: inside the transfers directory in your FTP/Web site, create a web directory and an ftp directory. The previous day's access logs will now be entered at midnight each night. Keep in mind: unlike the log directory which allows you to access Weblogs, these directories can grow very large quickly, so you will periodically want to back up this information and clear out these directories. There are many third-party analysis programs; Webtrends is one of the most popular. (See the Related Link below for more information on Webtrends.)

• I'm seeing a large number of 503 Service Unavailable errors. What does this mean?

  This error code is generated when the server is under heavy load and cannot complete the request. Cape.Com's shared web servers provide service for multiple, Virtually Hosted domains. Each domain is afforded its own amount of resources, to prevent heavy traffic load for one domain from affecting traffic to other domains hosted on the server. So, while one domain may be seeing high numbers of "503 Service Unavailable" errors, other Virtually Hosted domains on the same server may see no errors. If statistics for your Virtually Hosted domain show a large number of 503 errors, it may be time to move off of a shared web server and onto our Managed Dedicated Hosting plan. This plan provides users with their own, dedicated web server.

Related Pages

Related Links