cPanel Statistics Programs
cPanel is the control panel that is deployed by many web hosts to allow them to provide their clients with Linux based web hosting; cPanel has many features that allow its users to administrate many different parts of their website, including the ability to generate bandwidth statistics from many different built in programs to allow them to get a detailed view of their bandwidth use. Bandwidth is the type of traffic that you have assigned to your web hosting account, and normally the amount that you use up is based on how many visitors you have as well as how ‘bandwidth heavy’ your website is - something which is normally dependent on how many images your website is made up of; bandwidth is normally measured in gigbytes (GB) due to the number of visitors many website receive nowadays as well as how multimedia heavy websites on shared hosting are becoming. cPanel contains many different bandwidth statistic generating programs such as AwStats, Webalizer and then a built in bandwidth usage chart maker; each different solutions covers how bandwidth is used in its own different way, but all have the sole aim of generating statistics and charts to inform you of how much bandwidth your shared cPanel web hosting account has taken up. Since there are several different bandwidth usage statistic generator programs built into cPanel, identifying the use of each individual one can be hard; once you have identified the use of each one then you should be able to monitor your bandwidth with effect - you won’t just have to look how much you have used, but instead you can see where it is being use as well as where your visitors are originating from, something like that can help you with the SEO of the site as well as give you the ability to market towards a certain country.
Latest Visitors
The ‘Latest Visitors’ function built into cPanel displays the last 330 visitors that you have had to your website. It displays all the files called by each host along with which protocol was used to call the page, and the user agent string attached to that certain visitor; the HTTP code and the size of the file called is also displayed - all the files called are contained under a category titled with the user’s IP address to ensure that you don’t get each visitor muddled up when going through the statistics. The date is also contained with these statistics; this can be helpful to you since you can then know which pages of your website are being accessed and at what time of day - this kind of information is gold dust if you are aiming to advertise your website or optimize it for search engines in a better way. The latest visitors function can also aid you the detection of errors in your website since the HTTP code is included with each page call; if the message received is not the correct one then it may be dictating an error to you.
AWStats
AwStats is a visitor counter add-on built into cPanel, although it requires activation from WHM before cPanel accounts are able to use. AWStats shows you how many visitors your website receives daily, and break the numbers down into different categories to give you a better idea of how much of your audience and how much of it is just search engines crawling your website; this can help when trying to find out how successful your website is if it doesn’t contain a community space such as a forum of chat room. AWStats also displays information such as the hostnames of your visitors and even does a reverse search on the IP addresses of your visitors in order to show you which countries they come from; it then breaks this information down to show you how much bandwidth each country that your visitors originate from has used up. The different visitor categories within AWStats are signified in graphs via the use of graphical images to make each different category out clearly. AWStats is a great tool for search engine optimization since it shows you which pages your websites enter at, as well as where they exit; it also provides information on referrers where applicable. If your visitors originate from a search engine or something similar, then AWStats is also able to capture the search keyword or keyphrase that they entered in the search engine in order to reach your website. User agent strings are also broken down in AWStats to give you information on your visitors such as the operating system and browser they are using; although this information might seem pretty useless, it can help you when optimizing your website to suit different web browsers. AWStats also tells you where error messages are being received by visitors - this can help you to update links if needed, if there are out of date or incorrect ones contained within your website. The visitor history in AWStats can be broken down into a monthly history, a weekly history, a daily history as well as an hourly history.
Bandwidth
The bandwidth function that is built into cPanel displays graphical charts on how and when tha bandwidth assigned to your shared cPanel website hosting account has been used. The charts are able to show you how much bandwidth each different web hosting service attached to your shared cPanel website hosting account has used; this can help you in the event that you believe your certain FTP or mail subdomain is being attacked, as this will normally make the bandwidth of attacked service go through the roof. If you have more than one domain attached to your hosting account either via the use of add-on domains or sub domains, then the share of the final amount of bandwidth usage of each domain is generated and displayed as a pie chart in this part of cPanel; this ca be helpful if you have several different websites since you are able to tell how many visitors each different part of the site is receiving, and the amount used by each domain is displayed much more clearly than other bandwidth generating programs built into cPanel.
Webalizer
Webalizer is a bandwidth statistics generating system which works in a similar way to AWStats, by displaying the organized data into charts and graphs; the only difference is that the information that is generated by Webalizer is not as detailed as that generated by AWStats. The charts produced by Webalizer colour code each differnet category related to the generated statistics to ensure that the chart is actually readable; however, the information that is produced is only numbers and can be quite confusing for somebody who is facing Webalizer for the first time. Webalizer also has a separate FTP statistic generation program built into cPanel which can generate information about FTP usage within your shared cPanel web hosting account.
Raw Access Logs
Raw access logs are the logs which the statistics softwares that are built into cPanel base their statistics on. They can be helpful to you if you need to see who has accessed your website quickly. cPanel generates a GunZIP file which you are able to download which contains the access logs for your website as well as any add-on or sub domains that might be attached to your account as well as your main domain. You can also choose for cPanel to archive your raw access logs into your home directory to ensure that they’re backed up; you can also choose for the previous month’s archived logs to be deleted at the end of each month. Some of the data displayed in statistic generation softwares might also be changed in a certain way before it is displayed; by looking that the raw access logs you are able to ensure that the data you are seeing is the original data.
Error Log
The error log built into cPanel displays the last 300 errors that visitors to your website have been faced with. This log can be helpful if your website is giving out errors that you don’t know about; it also gives more detailed information about the error which can help when trying to solve it. This log can help keep your website running smoothly since its able to give you an indication of what links are broken, and where they should be fixed as well what files are missing but should exist. If your website experiences too many errors then the most likely scenario is that search engines will give up indexing it since all they’re indexing is errors; this log can help you make sure that there aren’t too many errors experienced on your website, and inturn ensuring that the search engines keep on indexing it.
