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How does Webalizer measure traffic?

Answer

Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites'number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during the reporting time period. This DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited, which is impossible to determine using just logs and the HTTP protocol however, this number might be about as close as you will get).

The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was sent out by the server during the specified reporting period. This value is generated directly from the log file, so it is up to the web server to produce accurate numbers in the logs. In general, this should be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing traffic the server had, regardless of the web servers reporting quirks.

Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates an HTML document, would be considered a page. This does not include the other stuff that goes into a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the other 'stuff' that is in the page. What actually constitutes a 'page' can vary from server to server. The default action is to treat anything with the extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi' as a page. A lot of sites will probably define other extensions, such as '.phtml', '.php3' and '.pl' as pages as well. Some people consider this number as the number of 'pure' hits. Some other programs refer to this as 'Pageviews'.

Category

Technical Support , Account Questions

Tags for this item

Account Features , Webalizer