Server Stats Changes for Roadside Multimedia Sites

Server Stats are an important part of having a website. These stats allows you to monitor the traffic to your website and even see how people are finding your website. If you ever want to view your site's stats, use the following format for your site; www.optimize-my-website.com/plesk-stat/webstat.

For those of you that are familiar using these stats, you will notice that the format is changing to the above address example. The server hosting company that we have been using has updated the tools on our webserver and is depricating the current format of www.site.com/astats. On the plus side, you will now be able to more easily view historical stats.

What are awStats

If you are unfamiliar with the awStats program then you will be delighted to see what it offers. When looking at your site's stats notice the references to:

• Unique visitors - Different people who visited your site during the month.
• Number of visits - All visits. Some people only came to your site once while others return many times.
• Pages - Refers to HTML pages viewed and does NOT count Flash pages.
• Hits - The number of items loaded on the HTML pages. Many advertising agencies quote hits for visitors. Do not be mislead.
• Bandwidth - The amount of data transmitted while displaying your site.

AwStats also provides a nice graphical interface with charts and such to help in visualizing the numbers. Further down the list is additional information that may prove helpful in studying your site's success on the web.

Why awStats and not Something Else?

There are two excelent reasons for using awStats over the other options. 1) awStats does not charge a useage fee that would have to be passed onto you and 2) it is one of the few stats programs that seperates search engine spiders from visitors. The search engines look at your site many times each month and adding their visits to those of real human visitors can be very misleading.

You have probably heard of Google Analytics, Urchin or some other remote stats programs. These are fine to use and we are happy to set your site up to use them, but they also are usually too inaccurate in what they count; although they often work with other services such as a PPC provider and then can provide some rather helpful options.

If you have any questions in understanding your server stats, please feel free to call and we will be happy to explain the details.