How to use AWstats
There are many perks to being a Maine Hosting Solutions customer but one of the MANY amazing features that we often overlook is AWstats. AWstats is included in cPanel on every hosting account. Simply login to your cPanel and click on the AWStats icon.
What is AWstats?
Advanced Web Statistics (AWStats) is an amazing web server logfile analyzer that shows you all your web statistics including: visitors, pages, hits, hours, search engines, keywords used to find your site, broken links, robots and more.
The main advantage of AWstats vs. other web analyzers such as google analytics, is that this program will not only analyze web logs, but also FTP and mail ones, which will give you a lot more detailed information about the activity taking place on your website.- AWstats allows you to get a good understanding of visitor numbers from both humans and robots, and monitor how much bandwidth is being used. You might also be able to detect if someone is hotlinking to your images or document files too, and taking your bandwidth that way.
- It is a tool for network administrators as well as marketers. Don’t waste your time or money on stat counters or visitor counters which are usually inaccurate- AWstats is a server based analyzer and is included in any of our hosting packages that are offered from a Starter Plan to a Super Plan! AWstats is located in the control panel and contains just about any information that you could ever want or need in regards to monitoring activity on your site.
Here are the top 5 pieces of information that you can pull from your AWstats:
Monthly History: This graphs out the unique visitors, number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth on a month by month basis (see chart).- Weekly/Rush Hour Activity: This charts out the activity of your site based on the hours of the day. It will show you the busiest and slowest times that activity is being generated.
- Search Keyphrases: This analyzes and displays the keywords or key phrases that users typed in in order to get to your site. This can be a huge to tool to utilize if you plan on doing any SEO or promotion for your site.
- Fan Favorites: AWstats allows you view your sites most viewed, entry and exit pages by visitors. It also calculates the number of times your site is “added to favorites bookmarks”.
- Robot/Spider Counter: These are automated programs that enter into websites and follow internal links to seek content and use them as key phrases that may pertain to your websites products. With AWstats, you can track these search engine robots and estimate when your website will be found and be established on the internet.
AWstats Questions:
- Does AWstats work with WordPress? YES, AWstats will grab data for all file requests that in your www/ directory.
- How do I access my AWstats on my MHS Account? Simply login to your cPanel and click on the AWstats icon.
Let us summarize by saying that AWStats is AWESOME! You can pull data and create graphical and textual displays of your sites activity. As an added bonus, AWStats offers the ability to export data into an XML format for presentations. Remember that this program is free with any hosting package and is located right in your control panel. Enjoy!
Also see: cPanel Hosting Features
