1and1's visitor stats bite donkey balls

June 16, 2006 2:18 PM

My host doesn't count some visitors to my website. Why the heck not?

I use 1and1 to host my portfolio website. When I look at the user statistics, not once has it registered a user accessing my website using GCI.com, the cable internet provider in my area nor does it show any visits from anybody accessing from a state government computer (the largest employer in town and my workplace as well). I would suspect that these two sources should be the bulk of my visitors and, at the least, I should register when I visit my site from work. Obviously, these are errors. Why is it not counting them and what do I need to do to get a better idea of who is visiting my site? I hate the fact it is missing the very people I want so badly to see.

posted by Foam Pants to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Thanks to this previous question, and this question I was able to get Awstats working on my 1and1 account relatively easy with the help of this tutorial (specific for awstats on 1and1).
It is way better than stock 1and1 stats.
posted by sailormouth at 2:50 PM on June 16, 2006

first question should have gone here http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/24899.
posted by sailormouth at 2:51 PM on June 16, 2006

Response by poster: Jeebus, my search words must have been totally messed to have missed those. Thanks for the linkies.
posted by Foam Pants at 5:42 PM on June 16, 2006

It's funny, Foam Pants, I always find that 1and1's stats seem to be inflated. We had 40,000 unique visitors over a two day period a while back, but 1and1 showed over 80,000.

Anyway, as the poster of the first question, I would say getting AWStats up and running following those guidelines is easy, but I've had problems lately. Around December it just stopped counting. One day it just pooped out. I hadn't changed anything, I called 1and1 and they hadn't changed anything.

I ended up reinstalling it in March, when we had a significant spike in visitors. I couldn't get the crontab to work quite right and had to get it to update manually. Even then it wasn't counting all the visitors it should have and I haven't had time to run through the settings to get it running correctly again. I don't even know where to start, frankly.

Since you can't actually go in and change the settings on the 1and1 stats package, I would also suggest you get a Google Analytics account. Since it's for a portfolio and not a professional site for which you're trying to get advertisers, it's probably a good solution for you.

In the end, it's good to run a few programs to get a good idea of what's going on. When they were all running correctly, I was using AWStats, 1and1's package and Google Analytics. They'll generally show the same information, but I felt they gave me a more holistic picture of what was going on.
posted by Captaintripps at 5:58 AM on June 17, 2006

Captaintripps, awstats went werid in Dec/Jan because of how the tutorial setup the config file to look at logfile names. I had the same problem you described. I went back to the tutorial and saw that he changed the config file (page 2 the "LogFile=" line). I made the changes and everything started working again.
Other than that awstats has been great.
posted by sailormouth at 6:55 AM on June 17, 2006

I'll give it a shot again. When I reinstalled I used the updated tutorial (noticed that, too), and it's still not updating on its own or correctly.
posted by Captaintripps at 8:04 AM on June 17, 2006