Website Statistics

The following sections explain where you will find your site statistics and how they are generated.

Website statistics are generated for all Anchor web hosting accounts.

Sample website statistics are available online.

Where are the statistics located?

Statistics for your website can be found at http://www.yourdomain.com.au/stats/ For example, if your site address is www.modelboats.com.au then you will find statistics for your site at www.modelboats.com.au/stats/

Why is there is no 'stats' directory in my web hosting account? We use a configuration on the server to redirect any requests for statistics to the actual location we store them in, for security reasons we cant store the pages in your individual hosting account.

How are the statistics generated?

Every page on your website sits in a file on the Anchor web servers.

Every time anyone on the Internet looks at a page on your website a program on the server called a 'web-server' gives the file to the visitors web browser.

The web server can be used to do all sorts of different things with the file as it gives it to the visitors computer. For example in a dynamic website, the contents of each page might be changed by looking at a database.

As the web server handles each file it keeps a record of the file that was requested by the visitor, the date and time the file was requested and it tries to collect information about where the person was located that asked for the file.

The records are examined on a daily basis and statistics are generated about all of the files that were requested each day. From this information, daily and monthly summaries are created to tell you about the type of traffic your site has received.

See the samples below and the following explanation of terms for more details on the type of information that is available from the statistics.

The site statistics are generated by Webalizer

Do you need more detailed statistics??

The information provided in the sample for the statistics is the limit of what can be provided by the web server alone. It is possible to collect more information about the people visiting your website and the nature of the usage, but, this requires development of customised reporting systems.

If you require a higher level of statistical information you should discuss your requirements with your web developer.

Explanation of Terms

The most important value is 'Visits' this gives the most accurate representation of the total number of people that visited your site. Visits are always displayed in yellow. All of the other information provided in the statistics is not very important compared with the number of visits. A detailed description of each of the other terms is provided below.
Use the number of visits as a relative measure of the to compare the performance of the site from day to day or month to month.
Hits. Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic images, audio files, CGI scripts, etc... This number represents the total number of requests that were made to the server during the specified report period.
Files. Some requests made to the server, require that the server then send something back to the requesting client, such as a html page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered a 'file' and the files total is incremented. The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'.
Pages. Pages are, well, pages! Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates an HTML document, would be considered a page. This does not include the other stuff that goes into a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the other 'stuff' that is in the page. Some people consider this number as the number of 'pure' hits... I'm not sure if I totally agree with that viewpoint. Some other programs (and people ) refer to this as 'Pageviews'.
Sites. Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during the reporting time period. This DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited, which is impossible to determine using just logs and the HTTP protocol (however, this number might be about as close as you will get).
Visits. Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address (site), the amount of time since a previous request by the address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). The default timeout value is 30 minutes (can be changed), so if a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered. Note: in the 'Top Sites' table, the visits total should be discounted on 'Grouped' records, and thought of as the Minimum number of visits that came from that grouping instead. Note: Visits only occur on PageType requests, that is, for any request whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the PageType option. Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations and other factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate, rather, it should be considered a pretty close guess
KBytes. The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was sent out by the server during the specified reporting period. In general, this should be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing traffic the server had.
Top Entry and Exit Pages. The Top Entry and Exit tables give a rough estimate of what URLs are used to enter your site, and what the last pages viewed are. Because of limitations in the HTTP protocol, log rotations, etc... this number should be considered a good rough guess of the actual numbers, however will give a good indication of the overall trend in where users come into, and exit, your site.

Did you know that Anchor can also provide you with

Spam and virus protection on all of your email services
Quality Australian based web hosting services
.au Domain name registration as well as registration of gTLD domains?