Displaying web stats

August 8, 2005 2:30 PM

Web stats: My web host's stats display sucks. I have access to the raw log files, is there anything I can feed them into to get decent results?
posted by o2b to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Response by poster: I forgot this corollary: I've never run out of bandwidth on my hosting plan before, but I just got a notice that I've already burned through August's quota. Something's wrong -- what should I look for first, second, third?
posted by o2b at 2:32 PM on August 8, 2005

I'll be waiting on this answer too, especially since the few programs I've found did little and cost $200+.
posted by rolypolyman at 2:41 PM on August 8, 2005

Analog is decent and free.

Urchin stats costs some kind of money and looks pretty slick, I used that at my old company. It's somewhat de-facto.

Livestats is used by a few of my customers, I don't really know anything about it.

All of these would require you to run them on some other machine, and download and feed them your log data manually. This will have varying degrees of difficulty. You generally get what you pay for in terms of quality of output.
posted by autojack at 3:03 PM on August 8, 2005

Summary.net is pretty cheap for a small site ($59 for up to three domains) and it's decent. 30 day trial and it has a bandwidth report that'll tell you what's filling up your pipe by file.
posted by kindall at 3:18 PM on August 8, 2005

Weblog Expert is very good and runs under Windows. There's a free Lite version and the full version is less than $100.

I use Analog for another site; it requires a couple of complementary apps to build a nicely formatted report--Report Magic (reports generation) and AnalogX for DNS lookup. These run under Win Apache and require fiddling with a very customizable config file and creating a couple of batch files.

After getting burned by AWStats earlier in the year, I perform all my log analysis locally. Yes, I know it's fixed, but still.

I'd use the lite version of Weblog Expert to get quick results on what's eating up your bandwidth. Whatever is causing it should show up without needing the features of Pro.
posted by elle.jeezy at 3:33 PM on August 8, 2005

I like Logan Pro. Decent looking reports, and pretty good features. And it's shareware, so you can try before paying the $49.95.
posted by gemmy at 3:46 PM on August 8, 2005

awstats is what I use for my (tiny) hosting company.

It's pretty feature rich...
posted by tomierna at 5:04 PM on August 8, 2005

Not to threadjack, but elle.jeezy, how did you get burned by awstats?
posted by tomierna at 5:05 PM on August 8, 2005

There was a pretty big exploit in awstats that wasn't fixed till March of this year. If your log file parser's output is web accessible, I highly recommend restricting it to specific hosts and/or having authentication on it. If you use awstats (which is what I use, it's not bad), I'd also recommend not installing it under the default location. This is where all the script kiddies's ha><or script look for it.
posted by cmm at 7:12 PM on August 8, 2005

I use webalizer - it's OK. I tried weblog expert lite, too, which worked, but I prefer the output from webalizer. It's also free.
Available for Windows or Unix or Mac OSX.
posted by handee at 6:47 AM on August 9, 2005

Sawmill is good. And if you submit bug/usage reports, it's also free.

*very* powerful drill-down, filtering capabilities.
posted by joshwa at 4:46 PM on August 17, 2005