Webalizer is one of the two web statistics packages included in cPanel hosting. If you are using cPanel for your hosting, then chances are you are familiar with Webalizer, too.
Webalizer uses your usage logs and access logs to generate HTML-based analysis.
According to the cPanel documentations, Webalizer is capable of creating graphs and charts about who (and what) visits your Web site.
Webalizer gives you more information about your:
1. Hits.
This includes any logged requests made to the server, such as requests for pages, graphs, multimedia files, images, scripts and other elements of a Web page. In short, hits reflect the total number of requests that the server received.
2. Files.
When the server is required to send something in response to a request, that is called a file. The number you see in Webalizer under Files corresponds to the total number of files that the server sends out. So hits reflect the incoming requests, while files reflect the responses to these requests.
3. Pages.
This includes any HTML document or those that create an HTML document such as .html, .cgi, .php and .pl files, among others.
4. Visits.
When the server receives a request from an IP address, the server checks to see if this is a new IP address. If it is not a new IP address, it will check the last time the IP address made a request and will compare it with the pre-configured visit timeout. If the computed time is greater than the visit timeout, then it’s considered as one visit.
5. Sites.
The number under the Sites column shows how many different IP addresses made a request to the server during the month. This is different from the number of people who actually visited the site, but from among the statistics given by Webalizer, this is the best estimate of that.
6. Kilobytes.
This tells you the amount of data that was sent out by your server during the period and is a good indicator of your site’s traffic.
There are other data that you could get for your site when you click on any month on your Webalizer’s main page. Among others, this includes the:
• Top URLs accessed on your site.
• The referrers. This will tell you how many requests were made directly into the users’ browsers and how many of your visitors come from other sites and what these sites are.
• The search strings, or the keywords and phrases used by your visitors to find your sites.
• The user agents, or the browser used by your visitors such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and others.
You could also get demographic data such as the number of visitors that come into your site for each country, the host names of your visitors, what URLs they landed on and which pages they exited from.
As you can see, there are a lot of insights that you could get from looking at your Webalizer analyses. You no longer have to get confused trying to look at your log files, and you can get the information you want in an easy-to-digest and easy-to-understand Web page that you could access anywhere.
What’s more, the analysis is done quickly and is compatible with any log file format. If you find that there are some sections you do not need, you can easily configure it to show only those that would benefit you and leave out all the rest.
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