I'm using a program called wusage which analyzes the server logs. They're publically available at http://www.daniweb.com/wusage/ (note: they're updated nightly, so the day's statistics are never accurate)
Take the day of 11/17/2003, for example
Overall Accesses: about 70,000
Visits: about 3,000
Visitors came from about 3,000 distinct IPs
Does this mean that DaniWeb received 3,000 unique visitors and 70,000 pageviews? Or is that 70,000 referring to hits (i.e. includes hits to images, etc.) ??
I know that with Webalizer, which is the one I've used mostly, the 3,000 number you have would be the unique visitors.
I would also think that the 70,000 would be the pages that were called, so yes, pageviews...
According to the section below the chart, that says:
The web site received 2,921 visits. A typical visitor examined 19.47 documents before leaving the site. If you multiply the two together you get 56871, which shows as about 13,000 less than the "accesses" number provided above.
Some of the other numbers I looked over don't appear that accurate, like when looking at "Top Documents" for the entire month of Nov, it shows 1,068 accesses for /techtalkforums/ which seems Low even if it is only referring to the exact url match.
I don't understand how such a program can be off? It's a server-side program which simply analyzes raw logs, no? For example, there's no code I place on any of my pages that could account for a page not completely loading, a visitor without JavaScript capabilities, etc.
I've heard that Webalizer is very good. There are a few others I heard of. Does anyone have any suggestions? The reason I went with Wusage is because it's a paid program that my webhost provides for free to all clients.
I think most of the variants you get are just on the programming side of the software... I seen Wusage around before, but have never used it, so I can't say from experience how it really works...
There are many people who think Webalizer is the best free stats program you can get... but even it has its issues... overall its decent.
Overall, however the programmer/programming team have set up thier software to interpret the server logs is the only way it will process the results, so if they have a problem within thier code, and maybe left out a possiblity in parsing logs, it could have problems, and reflect inaccurate numbers.
I had problems once with Webalizer, and I don't really remember the exact details, but there was an odd entry in the Apache logs, and it would die everytime it reached that point... I had to eventually go into the logs, locate the line, which thier code didn't tell me where it was... so I had to sort through a weeks worth of logs, and delete the line in order to get them to run again... It was an older version of Webalizer than the current one they have out, so maybe some of the bugs will get worked out... Once I get the new server I'm working on set up, I'll let you take a look at the way they look & feel.
I told you the other day, Wusage seems confusing. Get Webalizer or Awstats or Analog(and use ReportMagic with it), all these 3 are cool.
You might have paid $25 for Wusage, but I tell you Webalizer, Awstats, Analog are free anf all are better than Wusage.
Also, no one stops you from having multiple log analyzers. You can have all four of them. There will be some difference (generally 0-2%) in the stats shown by each of these 3.
DaniWeb switched servers and now we use Urchin. I can't get over how great their statistics are. I can definitely tell you that we get 20,000 uniques daily now. :)
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