Your Web Site

log file & analysis reports


When you host a web site with us, a log file is automatically generated for you. A new entry is made to the log file whenever somebody accesses anything on your site. Each line in the log file corresponds to a single access, and gives information such as the date and time of the access, the IP address of the person surfing your site, the exact item they are accessing, the URL of the page that directed them to the item they are currently accessing, the browser they are using, etc.

This log can be used by you to gauge roughly how many people are accessing your site, what the most popular items on your site are, where people are coming from and how they got to your site, what search engines they used to find your site and the search terms they used, etc.

However, the raw log file isn't a whole lot of good on its own - its just a huge jumble of text! To really get a handle on what is going on, you need a log file analyzer. There are many such programs out there that you can download to your personal computer. You then need to download the log file and run it through the program. The biggest problem with this method is that you are required to download the log file before you can do anything with it. These log files can get pretty big, so it can take a long time to download them! And of course you need to have the spare hard drive space, etc.

An alternative that we provide is a web log analysis report right on our site. Instead of you having to download the file and run the analysis on it, our system does the analysis and stores the report for you to view in your home directory. This is a service that we provide free of charge, but you do need to contact us to have us enable it for your account if you are interested in it. (We do this because the report will take up a little room in your home directory, and also because it takes some time to crunch through the analysis, so if you aren't interested in it, we won't waste our server time or your disk space quota on something that won't be used.)

The report is generated from the log files which are in your home directory, so if you delete them, the data contained in them won't be in the report. The reports are generated automatically, once per week. (Every Saturday morning) The report itself can be deleted after you read it, and it will just regenerate the following week.



Raw log files

Your raw log files are contained in the "wwwlogs" subdirectory of your home directory. They are stored in subdirectories based on the year and month, as well as the name of your domain. For example, if we are hosting "yourdomain.com" for you, the web log for March of 2001 would be located at wwwlogs/2001/03/yourcomain.com_access.log. There will also be a link to the current month's log file in the "wwwlogs subdirectory, based on the name of your domain (i.e. yourdomain.com_access.log)



Web analysis reports

The web log analysis report is in the "reports" subdirectory of "wwwlogs", though you will most likely want to view it using a web browser. To view your report, you would use a URL such as the following:

http://www.twistedbits.net/~usercode/wwwlogs/reports

(Substitute your actual usercode for the "usercode" text in the above URL.) Appending "/wwwlogs/reports" onto your domain name will also work.

When you go to that link, you will see a list of the reports available for you to view (which will usually be just one, unless we are hosting multiple domains for you). Clicking on the report you want to view will bring up a usercode/password box. Enter your usercode and password to view the report. Note: viewing the report in this fashion is over an unsecured link, so it is possible for your usercode and password to be "sniffed". To prevent this, we recommend you set up an SSH tunnel to www.twistedbits.net and access your report through that. So, if you were to set up a tunnel from your local machine, port 80 to port 80 of www.twistedbits.net, the URL you would use to view your reports would be:

http://localhost/~usercode/wwwlogs/reports

(Once again, substituting your actual usercode instead of the "usercode" text in the URL above.) Or you could set up the tunnel to port 80 of your domain name and use a URL such as http://localhost/wwwlogs/reports

For information about how to set up an SSH tunnel, click here.



Note: To view the report over a secure SSL connection without having to worry about setting up an SSH tunnel, you can use a link like this:

https://www.twistedbits.net/~usercode/wwwlogs/reports

(Once again, substitute your actual usercode for the "usercode" text in the URL above.)
If something on this page is not clear or if you have any further questions, feel free to e-mail us at support@twistedbits.net.