www.SampleDomain.com Stats Page

• Daily Stats (non-working link)
• Weekly Stats (non-working link)
• Monthly Stats (non-working link)

Pages for old stats are retained on the server for at least six months; after that time, they may be archived off to save disk space. If you need to see archived stats, please contact support@tinker.com.

How to Interpret Your Stats

Daily Stats (non-working link)

• The Daily History Page shows totals and averages, by the day, since your web server began operating.
  • The Total Accesses, Total Bytes, Average Accesses, and Average Bytes refer to this entire time period.
    
  • The Latest Accesses and Latest Bytes refer to the most recently completed day - yesterday.
  • At the bottom of the Daily History Page there are links to the individual Day Pages, grouped by month.
  
  
• The individual Day Pages show more detail about single days. The most recent page is the page for yesterday (although there may be an incomplete page for today, see note below).

  Each individual Day Page includes these standard reports:
  

  • Overall Statistics
    • Unique sites served is the number of sites or computers (actually, the number of separate IP addresses, see note below) that accessed your web site that day.
    • Unique documents served is the number of different documents (html files and so on) that were served out. If you have dozens of pages on your site, but only three of them get served, people aren't exploring your entire site.
    • Total visits is the number of separate "visits" by users to your site. If the same user visits several pages on your site within a few minutes in the morning, and again in the afternoon, that counts as two visits. See the note below about calculating visits.
  • Access per Hour shows an hour-by-hour breakdown of access (hits) and number of bytes transferred.
  • Totals shows, for this day, the total number of accesses (or "hits") to all pages on your site, and the number of accesses to your home page.
  • Top Documents Sorted by Access Count shows the most frequently requested documents.
  • Visits Report shows some totals and averages, along with some example "trails" (see note below) of users through the site on their visits.
  • Top Sites by Access Count shows which sites (IP addresses) most frequently access your web server. If the name associated with the IP address is unavailable, the IP address is shown.
  • Top Referring URLs by Access Count shows the most popular referrers to your pages. When a user follows a link to one of your pages, the page that linked to your page is the "referrer". The web stats software automatically filters out referrers that come from your own web site, so that only outside referrers will show up in this list.
  • Top user agents by Access Count shows the most popular web browsers that access your site. By default they are grouped together by major version; for example, Netscape 4.0 and 4.1 will be grouped together, but Netscape 5.0 will be a separate line. If you'd rather have the report just show the "raw" browser id strings (for example: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 2.2.8-RELEASE i386)), let us know. Sometimes you'll see browsers with unusual names; generally these are "spiders", "crawlers", or "robots" that automatically index web sites.
  • Documents Not Found shows documents that were requested but not found on the server. This usually means that some link (on your own site, or from somewhere else) is pointing to a page that doesn't exist (or the URL is misspelled in the link, etc.).
  • Access by Result Code shows all the various results codes that were returned by the web server to requestors. (The user's browser interprets the results codes, so usually the user doesn't see the code at all.) Some interesting codes are:
    • 200 - OK - The server served the page requested.
    • 304 - Not Modified - The browser asked if it can use a page that's already in its cached, and the server replied that it can use the cached version, since the page hasn't been modified since it was cached by the browser.
    • 401 - Unauthorized - An incorrect username or password was entered when attempting to access a password-protected page.
    • 404 - Not Found - The requested page wasn't found on the server. These are also reported with more detail in the Documents Not Found section of the stats page.

About Counting and Filtering Accesses
The web stats software automatically filters out accesses to gifs and jpegs, so that all of the "accesses" numbers closely reflect the number of web pages actually accessed. For example, if a certain page includes six images, that counts as a single access (not one for the page, plus six more for the images).

The web stats software also automatically filters out accesses from our monitoring software, so our checking won't skew all your numbers!

About the Top Reports
The Top Whatever reports usually show the top 10 whatevers (unless there were less than 10 of them). This number is separately configurable for each of the reports. If you'd like us to change the configuration, please contact support@tinker.com.

About Incomplete Daily Pages
Occasionally a user will be accessing your web site at the time the logs are rotated at midnight. This sometimes leaves a log record for today in the log file for yesterday, causing a stats page to be created for today showing one or two access. Don't worry, it will be correctly merged into today's stats when they run tonight.

About Sites
In the reports, a site is really a separate IP address that accesses your web server. An IP address is the numerical address of a computer; for example, 192.168.34.27. Counting the IP addresses provides a good approximation of the number of computers or users that accessed your site; for various reasons, it's not an exact number, but unfortunately the http protocol doesn't transmit more precise data.

About Visits and Trails
A visit occurs when a user accesses one or more web pages within a short time period. A trail is the sequence of pages that the user accesses during a visit. The http protocol doesn't provide data about visits directly, so the web stats software infers visits by examining the amount of time between document requests from the same IP address. If each request in the sequence is not more than 5 minutes apart, the sequence is considered a visit. If the user returns after, say, 30 minutes, that starts a new visit.

Weekly Stats (non-working link)

The Weekly Stats also have two components:

• The Weekly History Page shows totals and averages, by the week, since your web server began operating.
  • On this page, the Latest Accesses and Latest Bytes refer to the most recently completed week - last week.
  • At the bottom of the Weekly History Page there are links to the individual Week Pages, grouped by year.
  
  
• The individual Week Pages show more detail about single weeks. The page for this week is updated every night with the information about the week so far. Of course, the most recent page for a complete week is the page for last week.

  Each individual Week Page includes the same reports as the Day Pages, except that that the totals and averages are for the week as a whole (or the week so far, if the week isn't completed yet). Some items of note:

  • The Accesses per Hour shows the average number of accesses during each hour.
  • The Accesses per Day shows the total accesses each day of the week.

Monthly Stats (non-working link)

The Monthly Stats also have two components:

• The Monthly History Page shows totals and averages, by the month, since your web server began operating.
  • On this page, the Latest Accesses and Latest Bytes refer to the most recently completed month - last month.
  • At the bottom of the Monthly History Page there are links to the individual Month Pages.
  
  
• The individual Month Pages show more detail about single months. The page for this month is updated every night with the information about the month so far. Of course, the most recent page for a complete month is the page for last month.

  Each individual Month Page includes the same reports as the Day Pages, except that that the totals and averages are for the month as a whole (or the month so far, if the month isn't completed yet). Some items of note:

  • The Accesses per Hour shows the average number of accesses during each hour.
  • The Accesses per Day shows the total accesses each day of the month.

If you wish to retrieve your log files for further analysis by another program, you can ftp them using your regular admin username and password.

• Log files are in the directory (folder) /var/log.
• The logfile for the current day is named httpd-access.log.
• The logfiles for previous days are named httpd-access.log.yyyy-mm-dd.gz, for example, httpd-access.log.1999-06-01.gz. These files are compressed with gzip, a standard Unix compression program. (Note this is not the same as "zip" or "pkzip" on Windows!) If necessary, we can make special arrangements to leave your log files un-gzipped, or to compress them in another format.
• Log files are "rotated" (e.g. the current day's log is closed, and the new day's log is started) at midnight each night. The stats processing happens in the wee hours each day.
• Error messages produced by the web server are placed in httpd-error.log. The error log is rotated daily and named by a similar scheme.

Old log files are usually retained on the server for at least three (3) months; after that time, they may be archived off to save disk space. If you have arranged with us to leave your log files uncompressed, your log files may be archived off more frequently. If you need to see archived log files, please contact support@tinker.com.

Miscellaneous Notes

The notes above describe the standard setup. If you have requested special configuration, your stats may not exactly match the above description.