Suggested Stats Application

[WildSeeker]

Greetings!

I'm not sure if this is an appropriate forum for this topic, but I was not able to locate a better one.

I am curious what Web Traffic Stats applications people are using to track traffic to and from your websites. Any insight into flexibility and cost would be helpful, as well as special features you find valuable/useful.

I am using a couple of free applications that come with Control Panel and am curious about other commercial applications that may provide a more robust analysis application. Any thoughts?

[elearning]

There are a lot of web based services, but they can become expensive.

You can also look at programs which take existing log files and churn through them and produce different types of reports. There are some very good applications out there, unfortunately the name of the one I'm using escapes me at this moment.

In Google do a search for "website tracking" or another related term(s) and you'lll find many companies that offer this.

In the past, some of my sites used HitBox (free) and I liked the stats produced by them. They are now going to a pay-for-use service though.

Mohammed

Greetings!

I'm not sure if this is an appropriate forum for this topic, but I was not able to locate a better one.

I am curious what Web Traffic Stats applications people are using to track traffic to and from your websites. Any insight into flexibility and cost would be helpful, as well as special features you find valuable/useful.

I am using a couple of free applications that come with Control Panel and am curious about other commercial applications that may provide a more robust analysis application. Any thoughts?

[acehost.com]

Hello WildSeeker,

Have you tried AWstats?, you can check out there site here http://awstats.sourceforge.net

Heres there demo http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

The software is free to download, you just need to install it to your server yourself.

[ronniethedodger]

Hello WildSeeker,

Have you tried AWstats?, you can check out there site here http://awstats.sourceforge.net

Heres there demo http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

The software is free to download, you just need to install it to your server yourself.

Yes. AWstats is very good, and is a highly rated package.

It does require mySQL though, if I am not mistaken. Check with your hosting service to see if it is available. Most services do provide it, but it will generally run you an initial setup fee for the mySQL database. That is it...no more fees, and this is probably about $10.

A commercial package (the one I use) is called Sawmill. This can be configured to run as an executable from your server, or on your own personal PC. Recommended to be set up on the server to reduce server time for the transfer of the log files...which can grow quite large.

One of the interesting things about this is that if you use it on your own PC, it comes with it's own server. In other words if you have an open DSL line and know your current IP address, you can access the program remotely with any browser over the Internet. Everytime I run out of State...I will set it up this way.

Other features are abundant and quite nice. One in particular that I like is that it comes with it's own DNS database...in other words, you can load IP addresses into it and assign human readable names to them -- like domain names or even just a label for it like My Home Computer. This comes in handy when you are able to identify the IP addresses of certain spiders, like Googlebot for instance. It also supports the use of an actual DNS service to do the look-ups for you...but that is a fee-based option that is set up with an external service. I do not use this option.

Other filters allow you to exclude certain things from the results reporting, such as certain IP addresses. This is good for identifying things like pesky worms, email spamming bots, and the like and exclude them from your reporting thereby giving you a more accurate account of what your stats are really like.

There are others too numerous to mention here. Best to just check it out at www.sawmill.net.

I am not sure how this all compares to AWstats though, because I have had no experience with it. You would probably have to compare their list of features and decide for yourself. Of course the price of AWstats can't be beat !!!!

Sawmill can be found at www.sawmill.net.

They do not have a demo to speak, but they have some samples of the product in action at http://www.sawmill.net/samples.html

[fathom]

A few:

HitsLink inexpensive for low traffic sites - gets costly if tons

IndexTools inexpensive for low traffic sites - gets costly if tons

Extreme DM Cheap