Web Hosting

Web Stats Glossary

Unique Visitor

A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this host make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.

The period shown by AWStats reports is by default the current month. However you can also click on the "year" link to have a report for all the year. In a such report, period is full year, so Unique Visitors are number of hosts that have made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during those year.

Visits

Number of visits made by all visitors.

Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the "pages" are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor (assuming that some of the unique IPs are logged with more than an hour between requests)

Pages

The number of "pages" logged. Only files that don't match an entry in the NotPageList config parameter (and match an entry of OnlyFiles config parameter if used) are counted as "Pages". Usually pages are reserved for HTML files or CGI files, not images nor other files requested as a result of loading a "Page" (like js,css... files).

Hits

Any files requested from the server (including files that are "Pages") except those that match the SkipFiles config parameter.

Bandwidth

Total number of bytes downloaded.

Entry Page

First page viewed by a visitor during its visit.

Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next month, you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages. That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages.

Exit Page

Last page viewed by a visitor during its visit.

Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next month, you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages. That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages.

Session Duration

The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit.

Some Visits durations are 'unknown' because they can't always be calculated. This is the major reason for this:

• Visit was not finished when 'update' occured.
• Visit started the last hour (after 23:00) of the last day of a month (A technical reason prevents AWStats from calculating duration of such sessions).

Grabber

A browser that is used primarily for copying locally an entire site. These include for example "teleport", "webcapture", "webcopier"...

Add To Favourites

This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated value of the number of times a visitor has added your web site into its favourite bookmarks.

The technical rules for that is the following formula:

Number of Add to Favourites = round((x+y) / r)

where
x = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/anydir/favicon.ico" with no 404 error
y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico" (with or without 404 error)
r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all browsers (r <= 1)

As you can see in formula, only IE is used to count reliable "add", the "Add to favourites" for other browsers are estimated using ratio of other browsers usage compared to ratio of IE usage. The reason is that only IE do a hit on favicon.ico ONLY when a user add the page to its favourites. The other browsers make hits on this file also for other reasons so we can't count one "hit" as one "add" since it might be a hit for another reason.

AWStats differentiate also hits with error and not to avoid counting multiple hits made recursively in upper path when favicon.ico file is not found in deeper directory of path.

HTTP Status Codes

HTTP status codes are returned by web servers to indicate the status of a request. Codes 200 and 304 are used to tell the browser the page can be viewed. All other codes generates hits and traffic 'not seen' by the visitor. For example a return code 301 or 302 will tell the browser to ask another page. The browser will do another hit and should finaly receive the page with a return code 200 and 304. All codes that are 'unseen' traffic are isolated by AWStats in the HTTP Status report chart,

The following table outlines all status codes defined for the HTTP/1.1 draft specification outlined in RFC 2068.

They are 3-digit codes where the first digit of this code identifies the class of the status code and the remaining 2 digits correspond to the specific condition within the response class. They are classified in 5 categories:

• 1xx - informational
• 2xx - successful
• 3xx - redirection
• 4xx - client error 
• 5xx - server error 

1xx class - Informational Informational status codes are provisional responses from the web server... they give the client a heads-up on what the server is doing. Informational codes do not indicate an error condition.  100 100 Continue The continue status code tells the browser to continue sending a request to the server.  101 101 Switching Protocols The server sends this response when the client asks to switch from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1  2xx class - Successful This class of status code indicates that the client's request was received, understood, and successful.  200 200 Successful 201 201 Created 202 202 Accepted 203 203 Non-Authorative Information 204 204 No Content 205 205 Reset Content 206 206 Partial Content The partial content success code is issued when the server fulfills a partial GET request. This happens when the client is downloading a multi-part document or part of a larger file.  3xx class - Redirection This code tells the client that the browser should be redirected to another URL in order to complete the request. This is not an error condition.  300 300 Multiple Choices 301 301 Moved Permanently 302 302 Moved Temporarily 303 303 See Other 304 304 Not Modified 305 305 Use Proxy 4xx class - Client Error This status code indicates that the client has sent bad data or a malformed request to the server. Client errors are generally issued by the webserver when a client tries to gain access to a protected area using a bad username and password.  400 400 Bad Request 401 401 Unauthorized 402 402 Payment Required 403 403 Forbidden 404 404 Not Found 405 400 Method Not Allowed 406 400 Not Acceptable 407 400 Proxy Authentication Required 408 400 Request Timeout 409 409 Conflict 410 410 Gone 411 411 Length Required 412 412 Precondition Failed 413 413 Request Entity Too Long 414 414 Request-URI Too Long 415 415 Unsupported Media Type 5xx class - Server Error This status code indicates that the client's request couldn't be succesfully processed due to some internal error in the web server. These error codes may indicate something is seriously wrong with the web server.  500 500 Internal Server Error An internal server error has caused the server to abort your request. This is an error condition that may also indicate a misconfiguration with the web server. However, the most common reason for 500 server errors is when you try to execute a script that has syntax errors.  501 501 Not Implemented This code is generated by a webserver when the client requests a service that is not implemented on the server. Typically, not implemented codes are returned when a client attempts to POST data to a non-CGI (ie, the form action tag refers to a non-executable file).  502 502 Bad Gateway The server, when acting as a proxy, issues this response when it receives a bad response from an upstream or support server.  503 503 Service Unavailable The web server is too busy processing current requests to listen to a new client. This error represents a serious problem with the webserver (normally solved with a reboot).  504 504 Gateway Timeout Gateway timeouts are normally issued by proxy servers when an upstream or support server doesn't respond to a request in a timely fashion.  505 505 HTTP Version Not Supported The server issues this status code when a client tries to talk using an HTTP protocol that the server doesn't support or is configured to ignore.

See Also

• Q103243: Web Hosting: How to Access Web Stats