Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology

Obtaining Access Logs for User Web Sites? 28

Posted by Cliff from the seeing-who-has-dropped-by-for-a-visit dept.
David Hilbert asks: "I have a very amateurish home page for sharing family photos and unusually useful links with my friends and family, here. For a long time my son hosted my website on his computer. He added a visitor log to it. Even though my web site is rarely accessed, I still had great joy in looking over my visitor log daily to determine who was accessing my website. My son's situation, changed, however, and he could no longer host my website. I still wanted a web site, however, so had my ISP host it as they do for any member. However, my web site visitor log was gone. My ISP was either unwilling or unable to give me a log file of accesses to my site. I found a temporary alternative, however. I subscribed to a commercial service at the ToolShack to capture and do a fancy analysis of my site's visits (with colorful pie charts, bar graphs, etc). Several months, later, however, Toolshack quit working for me. I sent email to the techies at Toolshack. 'It's a mystery to me' is all I got from them, so I canceled my account. I would like some help finding an alternate web site logging service. I have had no luck thus far. I could do it myself but my ISP doesn't allow any scripts on user's web sites. Any ideas on how I could get a visitor log?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Obtaining Access Logs for User Web Sites? More

Obtaining Access Logs for User Web Sites?

Comments Filter:

  • Logs... (Score:4, Funny)

    by CounterZer0 ( 199086 ) on Monday May 06, 2002 @11:33AM (#3469869) Homepage
    Boy, you're sure gonna have quite a bit of log file data to look over in a few minutes. At least the box was co-lo'd :)
  • Why don't you just get a new host? You should be able to get a decent shared host for $10-$20/month, with full reporting and other goodies.

  • Pay for Hosting Service (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheDawgLives ( 546565 ) <http://www.suckitdown.org> on Monday May 06, 2002 @11:43AM (#3469966) Homepage Journal
    I use linuxwebhost.com They are only like $7-10 a month and they have all the fancy usage logs built in, plus they let you run just about any script you want.

  • Change Hosting services... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mshiltonj ( 220311 ) <mshiltonj@NoSPaM.gmail.com> on Monday May 06, 2002 @11:44AM (#3469973) Homepage Journal
    Some hosting providers are lame. I recommend changing providers.

    I host my site at pair.com [pair.com]. It's a cheap ftp-only site that costs only $5/mo. The provide raw logs, or will run analog on them. I've never had a single problem with them.

    You can also get more robust accounts beyond ftp-only.

    If you're willing to pay for tool shack, then consider switching providers and getting stats and logs for free.
    • I use f2s [f2s.com], which costs me GBP40ish a year including domain name. Logs (raw and Webalizer), CGI, MySQL database and so on. Extremely cheap, extremely reliable. I'd recommend them.

      Protect-my-ass-disclaimer: YMMV, of course :)
    • In the same price range is your-site.com [your-site.com]. They charge $60 a year and have provided me excellent service. You can get your raw access logs and they run stat software called Urchin on them for you. They also offer a shell account (Solaris) and you run your own stat software. (I use The Webalizer [dmoz.org].)
    • A host provider that cannot provide logs needs to wake up. There is no excuse for not providing logs when apache can be configured to provide seperate log files for different directories or virtual hosts.

      Also, these log files can be mailed to the user.
  • If I were you, I would have jump ship long time ago, givern its fairly easy /cheap/or even free to transfer to another ISP. Anyway, if you don't want to do this, look for other some web page counter sites, I think they provide free site-stat tools. Upon google [google.com] search on "web counter" + "site statistics" return tonnes of sites which might be suitable for you...

  • Idea (Score:2, Informative)

    by Vodak ( 119225 )
    If you were willing to pay for the abilty to read logs then why don't you jump over to a web hosting comapny that includes logs in thier package deals? The ISP's webspace is never enough and most of the time they don't even allow you to run PHP scripts.
  • There are a bunch of services that will provide you with a counter or tracker, with varying report information available. Some will give you all the same data you'd see in a log file, others give you much less.

    There is a list of these services, including paid and free counters and trackers, at http://www.adbility.com/show.asp?cat_id=346 (adbility.com) [adbility.com] (select from the left-menu sub-options there).

  • a little offtopic.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    my comp ethics prof runs his own site so taht he can store stuff there and not be affected by our university's copyright policies. He also stores course info there.

    he told us in class that he gets compiled access stats delivered to him on the first of each month. he said it was interesting to see the spike in the graph the evening before and hours before the midterm.
    • My school has been offering "Blackboard" to classes for a few years. I TA'd a class last semester that used BB for everything. The way it was configured, students had to authenticate before they could access the website. This means, of course, that you can track individual user access patterns as well as class access patterns. Fortunately, you couldn't look at individual accesses.

      The thing that scared me the most was that you could rank users by how frequently they'd hit the webpage, what time of day they looked at certain sections of the site, etc... By presenting this information in aggregate form, you can figure out quite a bit about the work habits of a particular student. Even apache weblogs don't come close to this.
  • I have my site hosted through www.2mhost.com [2mhost.com]

    One of their selling points for me is that ALL of their servers are running Redhat and the cost for 50MB is only $1.50/mon
    As for seeing who has made it to your page, Webalizer (a pretty web access log front end) makes it easy to see where traffic is coming from.

  • no seriously. I use earthlink and they have some web logs for users. If you get their dialup plan for 21.95 they give you 10 Meg of storage included and also several email address (NOT aliases real email addresses). Along with the web space is a small tool called Urchin which tells how many hits you got and on what pages and how many times various images loaded up.

    If you want more than this info you can get a commercial account for 15 to 20 a month and have your own domain and they give you access to the log info. Aloowing you to see the referrer through a revers lookup. If someone searches google and then comes to your site it is in these logs but this is only for their commercial accounts.

  • old school image logging (Score:4, Informative)

    by starfighter_org ( 530923 ) on Monday May 06, 2002 @01:38PM (#3470940)
    There's an old way of adding logging. but you need to be able to execute perl scripts. You place an image tag that points to the perl script "IMG SRC=whatever.com/cgi-bin/image.pl" the perl script delivers the image, and writes the address info to the log file. You can just use a 1x1 pixle white dot if you want. You can modify the perl script to report what you want, or even format just like apache so analog can process them and make your web page display of your visitors. These days, it's easier to just use a real web host who'll give you you own logs.
  • www.thecounter.com
    I use it for a few websites I run.
  • There are lots of decent free or nearly free counters out there that provide usage info. Some are more complete than others, some require scripts and some don't. I use Sitemeter [sitemeter.com] and they do pretty well. Google on "web counters" or "free page counter" or something. It's not everything you could get from scanning full logs, but it's pretty good, and some give some decent statistical analysis.

  • Okay, I am going to troll (Score:3, Interesting)

    by inerte ( 452992 ) on Monday May 06, 2002 @05:00PM (#3472637) Homepage Journal
    Yep, mod this down as a troll, flamebait, it's not my duty to care, hitting the karma cap is always nice so you can rant and wave your hand like you just don't care.

    BUT.. c'mon. I am an avid newsgroup reader, specially at the limited range of "webmaster" stuff. Nice... Anyway, that's usually the question people do when they post for the second or third time. This, and including perhaps "What's a free web host?" and "Browser portability" would be what I call true newbie questions.

    No offense to the original poster, who asked the question. We were all newbies someday (yes, even I couldn't understand this client-server crazy thing!). Anyway, that would be at the top of any webmastering and designing FAQ.

    ANY faq.

    What I would normally answer if this was in a newsgroup would be "STFW", or 'Search the Fucking Web". Or Google (like if it has a difference ;-)

    So, what's this? Part of a Slashdot new commercial endeavor, to attract different target audiences? Why the heck is this posted in Slashdot?

    Like I said, we were all newbies one time or another. But we were... we were... that's now why we came to places like Slashdot, where I can get the news that fit my taste.

    Oh well, rant is over.

Slashdot Top Deals

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

Close