Tracking traffic on a website

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Why don't we have "hit counters" on this site? Well, all they are really doing is analyzing data that is already being saved by our hosting site - and there are a number of tools to do the analysis without having the overhead of the counters.

Here are some links to information about how you can do it too.

Analog	This free downloadable program will produce a whole range of reports from the log file reports maintained on your server. You can download the logfiles from your WWW server's system (via ftp), and then run Analog on your sytem to do the analysis. Some servers may offer the option of running the analysis on their systems.
Extending the tools	This site has additional software you can use to do further analysis on the data from your WWW server. As well, I found his explanation of the overall process of how to implement things a lot easier to follow. (The author, Leon Matthews, uses the "Analog" software above for the basis for the analysis.)

Note that you may need to contact somebody at your WWW server site to determine how to get the log files. If you are lucky, they'll have a link where you can find about how to do it or be happy to give you the ftp access information; otherwise, they may want to email it to you. But persevere: after all, since it is about your site, why should they hold back about the information?

Last updated 2003-05-13