Jul

31

Web host and its effect on Traffic of user

Filed Under Companies, General Issues, SEO and Strategies, Server Hosting | 1 Comment

To get a great deal of traffic on your is no simple matter, and also to find a hosting company for a site that is well promoted. Having spent the time to drive traffic to a website, no one would like that the website should go down. As the old saying goes, time is money, and the right web host can make a big difference when it comes to your site.

Bandwidth is one of the most important design considerations one has to keep in mind before picking a web host. If the web host is who is providing metered bandwidth to its clients will not do a lot to drive traffic to the site. This caused sluggish service, severe customer complaints and general heartache all around. Bandwidth can determine how many visitors one can receive per month.

Web Masters do not know the importance of bandwidth until they start running out of it. At that time the start taking action as to paste notices all over their site begging users not to save every page. Think about the fact that it is the same bandwidth that is consumed by the user when viewing pages that is consumed when the user saves it. When the site is being uploaded the web master did take the fact that he or she would have to spend extra money every month on bandwidth.

No matter how excellent any website is in terms of design and programming, when it comes to hosting, the web host has to have the necessary software to make all the programming work. Apart from that there are a excess of factors such as security and space. But when it comes to traffic, only one factor is important, and that is bandwidth. Getting to any site can be similar to getting home during rush hour if you do not have enough bandwidth, it’s very uncomfortable.

One thing that will go a long way in making certain that one does not have problems is that should avoid taking shared web hosting. A major disadvantage of shared bandwidth is that if ten websites reside on a server, and share bandwidth, then bandwidth is served on a first come first served basis so the traffic which has to come to you will have to wait and by that time maybe the user will loose interest and go to another site.

The only advantage of shared bandwidth can be got when you are the biggest drawer of traffic on your server; however this cannot be a sure shot guarantee. The only advantage is when you are on a basic budget. But for serious traffic, you can be sure you will have problems.

Dedicated hosting gives you private root access, your own unshared bandwidth, secure access, and one server for you and no one else. This is the best kind of hosting if you are a fairly large site and you expect large amount traffic. So it will be better to generate more traffic the type of web host you choose should have all the facilities of guarantying good traffic.

Jun

23

Unmetered and unlimited bandwidth hosting revisited

Filed Under Companies, Server Hosting | 1 Comment


The latest trend is to provide unmetered and unlimited bandwidth by the hosting servers. It has the advantage of not being deceptive for the customers. The market is always customers not the buyers the customer will decide what it has to buy, the seller is not able to decide the market.

The concept going on today is that bandwidth limits are no longer meaningful, but the usage of CPU and memory is more meaningful. As per the description of unmetered bandwidth the ultimate thing that limits bandwidth consumption is the amount of server resources used. The decision to gamble by offering unmetered bandwidth is based on mathematical reasoning and it’s a calculated risk.

It has been said that unlimited hosting cannot be taken at the face value but has to be taken at par with bandwidth or space. It general terms it can be said that unlimited means the regular or any standard website may need. Unmetered bandwidth on shared account means that a single user can use the complete bandwidth allotted to the server. It has been observed that it’s possible only for the dedicated servers. So all in all it’s not a very honest approach and is deceptive.

The main point in all this is that bandwidth costs money and the higher the bandwidth the hosting company provides you, lower will be its profit. So how does unlimited or unmetered bandwidth. It is just the question of doing calculations. The web sites use only a fraction of the bandwidth which is given by their web hosting companies. If the number of websites for any web hosting company is large then they can easily calculate how much bandwidth is actually used. It then gives them an average of the large traffic spikes in a given period of time and still be, then they can safely offer unlimited bandwidth and remain profitable

The marketing claims of web hosting companies having unlimited and unmetered bandwidth cannot at one go be called false. If you use unmetered bandwidth and are continuously using excess bandwidth it will not be surprising to hear from the sales people of the company that you have used extra bandwidth.

Unmetered bandwidth does work well for the web hosting companies as they try to sell more bandwidth. These unmetered bandwidth leads to having more companies in their business net, though with lesser profit. More business with less more profit will add to more profit on an average.

Unlimited bandwidth lets you have the facility of having unlimited traffic to you website. It will be better if while buying unlimited bandwidth you check the unlimited bandwidth description area of the hosting contract. It will make sure that you are not cheated and unlimited bandwidth web hosting should remain a feature so long as you host your website with an unlimited bandwidth web host company.

Unlimited bandwidth is very popular and gets lots of publicity but while going for it will be better to check as the real danger lies in the practice of overselling bandwidth. Unmetered bandwidth is not misleading advertising to a potential client. Unlimited is not possible but unmetered is possible as it is a common fact that bandwidth is a service that someone needs to pay for eventually.

Feb

16

Frequently Asked Web Hosting Questions

Filed Under Companies, General Issues, Hosting Software, Server Hosting | 1 Comment

Congratulations! After much thought and consideration, you finally took the plunge and decided it was time to have your own web site. That’s a great accomplishment in itself. However, now you’re left with another daunting task — selecting a quality web host.

Selecting a good web host is of the utmost importance. However, with all of the technical mumbo jumbo, knowing what to look for can be very intimidating to say the least.

For this reason, I have devised a list of the most frequently asked web hosting questions.

Question: I’m not exactly sure what a web host is. Can you please explain?

Answer: A web host is a company that provides you with server space for your web site. This includes all of the files associated with your web site. When your web address is typed into a browser, the web host displays your pages.

Question: Is it true that a good web host will cost me a lot of money each month?

Answer: Although the old adage “you get what you pay for” still holds true, there are many quality web hosts that are reasonably priced. You can expect to pay $20 - $50 a month for up to 50MB of space depending on the company and your specific needs.

Question: I have been considering hosting my site with a free hosting company, but I’m a little concerned with their reliability. Can you shed some light?

Answer: NEVER host an ecommerce web site with a free hosting
service. These services are highly unreliable and could care less if your site goes down. Their main concern is with their advertisers. As long as their ads are up and running, for the most part, they could care less about you or your site.

In addition, sites hosted with free services look very unprofessional. If you’ve taken the time to get your own web site designed and your own domain name, why would you risk your success and host with a free service? It’s just not worth it.

Question: I’m at my wits end. I’ve been to so many hosting companies and am completely overwhelmed. I have no idea what
company to go with. Can you please tell me what I should be looking for in a good host?

Answer: Selecting a quality hosting company can be an intimidating process. Your first consideration should be the company.

• Do they offer fast connections?
• Do they have a back-up system in place to protect your
data in case there is a power outage?
• Do they require you to make payments in advance?
• Do they require a long-term contract?
• Do they charge set up fees?
• How is their customer support? Test them.
• Do they provide you with free access to a secure server
for order processing?
• Do they offer shopping cart software to process
your orders?
• Do they provide you with an online Web Site Manager?
• Do they provide you with an online support manual?

Ask for references. Talk with some of their customers and ask them if they have been satisfied.

Here are some basic features you should look for when
selecting a web host:

1) 24/7 reliable tech support
2) Your own domain name (www.yourname.com)
3) At least 10GB of monthly transfer (traffic)
4) A minimum of 20MB - 50MB of server space
5) Unlimited true POP email accounts - name@yourdomain.com
6) Unlimited email aliases
7) Email forwarding
8) Unlimited autoresponders
9) Your own unrestricted CGI-Bin
10) Access to SSL Encryption for secure transactions
11) MySQL Database
12) Perl
13) htaccess password protection
14) Server Side Includes (SSI) support
15) Design (and upload to) your site using Netscape or
other HTML editing software
16) Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions for those
utilizing FrontPage
17) Unlimited free access to your server via FTP/Telnet
18) Easy access to your log files
19) Statistics on visits to your site
20) Referral Program

When selecting a web host, you must look at the entire
picture prior to making your decision. You may find a host
that charges $5.00 - $15.00 a month to host your site,
however, their technical support may be poor, or your web
site may be slow or down a lot.

A lower monthly payment may look appealing, but how much is
it actually going to cost you in lost sales? Most likely much more than the amount you’ll save.

Feb

16

Hosted Exchange: build in-house or use private label?

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Businesses of all sizes are looking at ways to drive efficiencies and are increasingly moving towards hosted options, particularly hosted Microsoft Exchange. The analyst group Radicati suggests that Microsoft Exchange will have 200 million users by 2009, so as a Web hosting company it’s a great opportunity for you to increase revenues from existing customers, as well as to attract new customers.

The question is whether it is more beneficial for you to build and maintain the infrastructure in-house or use a private label service to deliver hosted products to your customers.

The hosted services you’ll deliver are business critical applications such as email, so it is essential that they are always available to your customers without any extended downtime. In order to guarantee this, it is critical that you start with the correct hardware and software, and that it is configured, maintained and supported by trained personnel.

In addition, the hosting environment must be kept up-to-date and under the correct conditions. Your customers will also need to know that their data is safe and that they can get help if they have a problem, no matter what time of day or night it is. This often makes support a deciding factor.

To build your own in-house infrastructure, you will need a capital investment of up to $100,000, and you can expect to continue to pay for running costs and upgrades. Building and maintaining an in-house infrastructure also requires experience, planning and a highly skilled team to make sure that everything is managed efficiently.

Using a private label service means that all of this is taken care of for you: there are no up-front costs of buying and configuring the hardware and software; there are no ongoing upgrade or maintenance costs; and the service provider manages the Exchange environment, security and backup 24×7.

All you have to do is sell the service and provide tier-one support for basic problems customers may encounter, such as mailbox creation, email access and updating their DNS – most service providers will also offer tier-one training for your support teams. Any tier-two (technical) problems and inquiries can be escalated to the service provider, where they will be dealt with by a specialist support team.

In order to sell hosted Exchange to customers with confidence, you need to know that the service is reliable and secure. Your service provider should be able to give you this confidence. Our private label services, for example, are run in the latest Class A datacenters with N+1 redundancy, which are designed to create the optimum environment for servers and other hardware. This includes redundant power feeds, uninterruptible power supplies, backup generators, cooling and the latest security. The state-of-the-art systems are also designed so that there’s no one single point of failure, which means that they are incredibly reliable and can offer a minimum of 99.9 percent uptime.

Further, access to servers is restricted to a limited number of authorized engineers and security is strictly enforced using the very latest technology, including video surveillance, motion sensors and controlled ID key-cards, as well as security guards stationed at every entrance to the site.
In terms of selling to customers, private label programs often have services that are completely customizable, so you can match all color schemes, wording and logos to your company’s other assets. Some suppliers also offer professional Exchange marketing collateral designed for easy re-branding and even run joint business planning programs with partners.

As a result, you can now offer customers the best products that allow them to take advantage of enterprise-class Microsoft Exchange email and collaboration tools for a low per mailbox monthly fee, without the cost of buying, running and supporting the hardware and software yourself. There’s simply no reason to do it in-house.

Feb

16

Features of Microsoft Exchange 2007

Filed Under Companies, Hosting Software, Security Issues, Server Hosting | Leave a Comment

Microsoft Exchange 2007 is the new version of Microsoft’s market-leading Exchange email server. It simplifies communications, improves your ability to share information and increases message security and compliance.

Exchange 2007 is the most advanced messaging solution available, with full email, contacts, calendaring and wireless access capabilities. However, it is expensive to buy and install – over $10,000, even for smaller companies.

The most cost-effective way to implement the Exchange 2007 server for a small or midsized organization is to use an Exchange hosting provider. This will allow you to benefit from the new features, without paying the upfront costs of building an Exchange server in-house or having to maintain the server in the future.

Here are some of the new features of Exchange 2007:

Simplified and Integrated Communications

• Exchange 2007 allows you to customize your Out of Office messages through improved options, such as setting distinct messages for internal and external contacts.

• The Autodiscover feature will allow you to set up your Exchange account to the Outlook client quickly and easily – all you have to do is enter your email address and password and you’ll be started in minutes.

• Instant search will help you to locate information from any part of your Inbox by letting you search your e-mail (including attachments), contacts, tasks and calendar all at once.

• Unified Messaging lets you receive and access email, voicemail and faxes all in one place – your inbox.

Share Information and Schedule Meetings

• The sharing and meeting-scheduling tools of Exchange 2007 allow you to share calendars, task folders, contact lists and other information with colleagues and request to see the recipient’s information at the same time, allowing for improved group collaboration.

• Improved security levels for sharing govern who can view your schedule. You may provide access on a case-by-case basis and set different levels of permissions as you choose.

• The new Exchange 2007 Scheduling Assistant suggests the best time for a meeting based on the desired attendees’ schedules and even takes into account resource availability.

• The Booking Attendant easily allows you to schedule resources for your meetings by making it simple to search for and find available conference rooms or other resources.

Increased Message Security and Compliance

• Integrated security technologies provide the latest in active messaging protection to stop unwanted spam and viruses from entering your inbox.

• The new E-Mail Postmark technology manages email legitimacy by applying a token to email messages it sends as a check for the reliability of incoming messages.

Feb

16

What does hosted Exchange mean for Web hosting companies?

Filed Under Companies, General Issues, Hosting Software, Security Issues, Server Hosting | 1 Comment

Web hosting is a difficult industry, with prices and customer loyalty both on the decline. Most Web hosting companies are expanding their service offerings to fight these trends, and many of them are looking to offer hosted Microsoft Exchange services.

Research confirms that the vast majority of small businesses do not have sophisticated email, with mobile access and sharing of calendars, contacts and files. This leaves enormous growth potential for an offering that meets those needs.

The challenge for Web hosts, however, is the same as that of your small and medium-sized business customers: in order to offer an effective Exchange service, you have to invest large amounts of capital in the hardware and software, then manage the systems, maintain the equipment and the network and also support end-users.

The total cost over the first year, can easily exceed $100,000, which is both a large risk and also a difficult investment to recoup.

There is now an alternative, however: a number of hosted Exchange providers now offer private or white label partner programs, which allow you to sell your customers the latest hosted Exchange services, under your own brand, but without having to invest heavily in infrastructure, software and specialist personnel.

These private label programs offer the same infrastructure that the providers’ own customers use, with clustered servers, SAN storage, guaranteed uptime and all of the latest features of Exchange, badged as your own service.

The suppliers also provide marketing materials, sales coaching and level two support, which is handled by their own in-house support teams with specialist knowledge.

Feb

14

Benefits of Having a Dedicated Server

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Having a Web hosting server that is totally your own. It is the American dream right? You could put a little white picket fence around it, plant some flowers and call it home. Well not exactly. For you and me, buying a dedicated Web hosting server is a little out of our price range. Some can cost up to $500 or so a month to keep up and running. So with that being said, what are the benefits of having a dedicated Web hosting server?

Well the number one benefit of having your own dedicated server would be reliability. Think of it as you being stuck on a deserted island. You don’t have to worry about anybody else throwing coconuts at you or trying to take over your island. You and you alone are there and you can do whatever you want.

When you are on a shared Web hosting server, sometimes other people on the server can make life for you a little harder. Due to processes, scripts or other activities, your Web site might start coming up slower due to those other folks. With a dedicated Web hosting server, you are the only one on that server and you are not subject to such pesky activity. Well, unless you are the one causing it.

Having your own Web hosting server also provides you with a more cost effective way of hosting more than one domain. You can split that Web hosting server up as many times as you want, depending on how much space each Web site needs. True, you could do that with a Web hosting reseller account too. The only problem is a reseller account is still on a shared Web hosting server. As long as you are on a shared Web hosting server you are going to have reliability problems.

With that being said, you can also expect to see greater performance from your Web sites. Without sharing the server’s resources with 10 to 100 other people, your pages will come up quicker, your scripts will run faster, and it will be as if your entire Web hosting experience was on steroids.

Security is another good reason to go with a dedicated Web hosting server. With a shared Web hosting server, some things on the server itself are more open to see. Within a dedicated Web hosting server though you can keep more things to yourself and locked down for only your eyes to see.

Now when shopping for a dedicated Web hosting server, you might be confused by the “managed” and “unmanaged” lingo. With an unmanaged Web hosting account, you or somebody in your company will need to know how to deal with the server first hand. That is when hiring a system administrator might come in handy. Then they can worry about all the server side problems and configurations.

With a managed dedicated server though, more of those worries are in the hands of the Web host you bought it from. The only problem you might run into there is you want to make sure your Web host has a good quality staff of folks who know what they are doing when they are working on your dedicated server.

So there you have it, those are the big benefits of having your own dedicated Web hosting server.

Feb

14

How To Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth

Filed Under General Issues, SEO and Strategies, Server Hosting | Leave a Comment

You just received a higher than normal monthly bill on your credit card for web hosting. Your hosting company explains that you exceeded your monthly minimum for “bandwidth usage” and suggests reducing the size of your web site files.

What is bandwidth usage?
What does bandwidth mean?
How much bandwidth do you need?
How can you reduce bandwidth usage?
Let’s discuss each of these topics in more depth.

What is “bandwidth usage?”

This refers to the total amount of information that has been served to your web site visitors each month. Every file on your Web Site has a specific size (e.g. 22K). Every time a visitor downloads that file, your bandwidth usage goes up by that amount.

The larger the file, the higher the bandwidth usage when it is downloaded. The more traffic to your site, the more bandwidth you will use.

What does “bandwidth” mean?
Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The “data transfer rate” is the speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and Mbps, respectively.

Bits and Bytes
8 bits = 1 byte.
1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (Kb).
1,024 kilobytes (Kb) = 1 megabyte (mb or meg)
1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (gb or gig)

How much bandwidth do I need?
To determine how much bandwidth you need, estimate the file size of each web page, and then multiply it by the number of pages on your web site.
Multiply this figure by the number of the number of page views you expect per month from your site.

For example, if your web page consists of two 15Kb images and 3Kb of html, you would have 33Kb of data for that page. Now multiply this by the number of page views you expect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). This would mean 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per month for that page.

Now recalculate this number for each page, and you’ll know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.

How can you reduce bandwidth usage?
The easy way is to reduce the size of the files on your site, particularly images and other graphics. For example, you have a large image (i.e. 200KB) on your web page that is downloaded by each visitor every time the page is requested. If you reduce this image to 20KB or remove it altogether, it will dramatically cut your bandwidth usage. It will also speed up your site’s performance.

Web Sites that have MP3s to download, movies, music playing in the background and large images, will obviously have a higher bandwidth. Large web sites or sites that expect a lot of traffic, will also use a lot.

If your site has mainly html pages and small images, your bandwidth will not be that high.

Bandwidth Tools

Monitoring bandwidth
 http://www.utoronto.ca/ucres/netup.htm

Web Page Checker
 http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/page_size.cgi

Tuning up your Web Site
 http://websitegarage.netscape.com/

Bandwidth Tips
If you make changes to your site by adding more files and/or web pages, recalculate your web site file size.
Estimate how many visitors will be accessing your web pages over the next few months.
Recalculate the bandwidth usage for your site. You may need more web space and bandwidth for your site to function effectively.
Check with your web hosting company to upgrade your hosting plan.

Conclusion
Now you can avoid the shock of exceeding your monthly bandwidth usage and paying higher hosting fees. You are now ready to receive more traffic to your site and therefore make more sales.

Feb

14

10 helpful tips to follow when switching web hosts

Filed Under Companies, Domains, General Issues, Server Hosting | Leave a Comment

You’ve made your decision to move from your website from your current web host to a new web host. The following tips will help you make the transition easier and make you aware of some potential pitfalls to avoid.

1) Make sure the new web hosting plan you’ve chosen offers you the storage capabilities to handle all of your current website storage requirements. If your website is 50MB, you need to make sure your new hosting plan offers that much space, or more. If you’re not sure how much space your website is using, ask your current host. You can also usually find this information on your web hosting control panel.

2) How does your current web host determine what your storage amount is used for? Find out what your current and new host includes in your plan’s storage amount. Are your emails and log files counted towards your total storage, or just your web files?

3) What operating system does your current hosting plan use? Windows or Unix? Sometimes this can make no difference, in other cases it can make the difference between a working website and a broken website. If your site is currently on a Windows server and your website uses ASP scripting, you’ll find it difficult to make things work well on a Unix server, as ASP is a Windows based programming language. Find out ahead of time whether your current hosting plan is on a Unix or Windows server.

4) Does your site currently use FrontPage? Find out if your new host supports FrontPage. And make sure your new host supports the same version of FrontPage you currently use.

5) Find out if your new hosting plan offers you the same amount of bandwidth that your current host offers. You don’t want to be surprised by unexpected overage charges at the end of the month.

6) Does your new web hosting plan give you the same amount of email accounts, autoresponders and mail forwards that you currently use?

7) Does your site use a shopping cart that your current hosting plan provides? Can you move the cart to your new host? If not, does your new host have a suitable shopping cart replacement?

8) If you are using any scripts on your website, make sure that your new hosting plan supports all of your scripts. Find out in advance if you’ll need to make any modifications to your scripts to get them working on the new server.

9) Make sure to set up your existing email accounts on your new server before transferring your domain name to the new server.

10) Do you know how to upload your website files to the new server? If you don’t, you’ll need to find out if your new web host will upload your files for you. Some hosts will do this at no charge, some will do it for a fee, yet other hosts won’t do it all because of liability issues.

Once all your files are uploaded to the new server, you’ll want to double check that the site looks and functions properly on the new server. Most hosts can provide a preview link for you to see how your site looks before the domain name is transferred over. If your host does not provide a method for you to preview your site, you can modify your hosts file to preview your site. The host file tells your computer where to go to look for sites that are listed in that file. This works with any version of Windows. The file name is the same, the location can change. Here’s how to modify your hosts file:

The file HOSTS should be in the c:windowssystem32driversetc You might only find a file named HOSTS.SAM (as in SAMPLE). That is OK; we can modify the HOSTS.SAM file as well and do a SAVE AS HOSTS.

In either case, double click on the HOSTS file to open it. You will be prompted by Windows to select an Application (Program) to use to VIEW the file.

Scroll the list and select Notepad. Click the OK button. The NOTEPAD program will now open, displaying the file HOSTS. You will see examples listed (The # symbol is used to comment out line or remarks.), the format is this. IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx SPACE name)
So, to tell your computer that www.yourwebsite.com is at the address (replace with your real IP) 12.345.678.90 add the following entry to the bottom of the hosts file:
12.345.678.90 www.yourdomain.com (As in the example).

Click on FILE, slide down and click on SAVE AS.

In the Save As Type field, select ALL FILES. (Ensure that no .SAM is shown after the filename HOSTS. Click SAVE. You may be warned that the file already exists; this is fine, click YES.

Close Notepad, by clicking on FILE, slide down to EXIT, and click.
Now when you open your web browser, or try to ping the site, your system will go to the IP address you typed in the HOSTS file.

Remember to undo this when finished testing or your machine will always want to go to that IP address whenever you want to go to that site.

After you’re satisfied that your site looks ok and functions ok, you can go to your registrar (the company where your domain name is registered) and modify the nameservers associated with your domain name to your new web host’s nameservers. If you don’t know your new host’s nameservers, ask them. Most hosts have that information listed somewhere on their website or in the email you first get after signing up for an account.

Once the dns modification is completed it’ll be 24-48 hours before you’ll see your site on the new server.

Most whois utilities will display the nameservers of the current host. A good one is at http://whois.sc./ Check your domain name and see if the nameservers you added are listed. If so, you have completed the website transfer to your new web host. Only after you’ve confirmed this is it ok to cancel your old web hosting account.

Feb

14

How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic?

Filed Under General Issues, Hosting Software, SEO and Strategies, Server Hosting | 1 Comment

Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like
being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don’t
know which direction they are coming from or who they are.
Without analyzing your web site traffic, it’s difficult to
improve your web site marketing.

Know Your Traffic Language
You should be aware of the different terms used to describe
web site traffic, so as not to be confused about your web site
visitors. Here are the main terms used:

Visit – these are all requests made by a specific user to the
site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set
period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further
accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or
hostnames/ip addresses

Hit – this is a request to the server for a file not a page.
Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic
files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting in a
number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a
hit.

Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes
multiple hits to view a page.

Pageview/Impression – this is the number of times a page is
accessed as a whole.

Unique View - A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour
period.

Referrer - A page that links to your site. By looking at your
referrers will tell you who’s linked to your site. This can be
particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine
traffic is coming from.

User Agent - This refers to the software used to access your
site. Sometimes known as a “browser” or “client”, the term user
agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet
Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can
identify what software is being used to access your site, you’ll
be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search
engines last crawled your pages.

Ways to Track Your Visitors

1. Counters – these are heavily used on web sites by newbies but
appear unprofessional. It is very common to go to a page and see
something like “You are visitor number 12345 to this page”.
These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has the
ability to seed the base number or to alter the counter such
that it adds more than 1 each time.

2. Trackers – tracking software details the path a visitor takes
through your Website, so they do more than just count your
traffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more than
just the number of visitors — it can break visitor statistics
down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and
countless other values.

Examples:
Hitbox
Sitemeter
Extreme-DM

Counters and Trackers often require you to place a button or
graphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service,
which is not ideal for most site owners. So try to avoid using
these services unless you don’t have the ability or expertise to
execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server.

3. Using Your ISP’s Statistical Package
Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) keeps log files which record
every single “hit” (request for a Web page or graphic) on your Web site.

Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site
visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how
long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before
signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access
to raw log files. Even if you don’t need them immediately,
sooner or later you’ll be glad to have them.

There are also different types of log files - access, referrer,
error, and agent are the primary ones.

Here is a sample of a raw access log file entry:

Access log
Analyzing the access log will give you information
about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how
long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in
determining whether or not your site is working as you intend.

The record below shows the visitor’s IP number or hostname, date
and time of the request, the command received from the client,
the status code returned, the size of the document transferred,
and the browser and operating system the visitor was using.

nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] “GET
page.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 23443
“http://www.mydomain.com/page.html” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;
MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)”

Referrer Log
The referrer log contains referral information - the source that
referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine,
you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your
site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record
below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com
to the index page of the site.

http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> /

This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a search
engine link. Notice the keyword data is included in the record.

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips -> /

Agent Log
This log provides information on which browser and operating
system was used to access your site.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)

Error Log
The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated
by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows
the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification,
explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the
file that caused the error.

apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162]
File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico

As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about
how your visitors are using your site. Now we will talk about how
you get the relevant data extracted from the log files and compiled
into a useable format.

4. Web Traffic Analysis Software
These are programs that analyze your server logs and then create
traffic reports accordingly. The quality of the reports generated will
depend on what software you actually use. Some log analyzers are
free and come preinstalled on many hosting accounts, while others
can cost a good deal of money.

Examples:
Webalizer
WebTrends

Webalizer (free)
The Webalizer is a fast, FREE, web server log file analysis
program which produces usage statistics in HTML format
for viewing with a standard web browser. The results are
presented in both columnar and graphical format, which
facilitates interpretation. Yearly, monthly, daily and hourly
usage statistics are presented, along with the ability to
display usage by site, URL, referrer, user agent (browser),
search string, entry/exit page, username and country.

Here’s an example of the Web Usage Statistics:
http://www.webalizer.com/sample/index.html

WebTrends ($495)
The Web Trends Analyzer produces essential reports on
web site visitor patterns, referring sites, visitor paths and
demographics. You can learn, for example, which sites
and keyword searches have referred the largest number of
visitors to your site.

It presents data, detailed and in-depth, in an organized and
concise tabular format with full-color graphs.

This Log Analyzer is priced at $495 and is licensed for a single
web server hosting content with a maximum of 50 domains.

Conclusion
Web traffic statistics provide very valuable information about your
web site. You can make better marketing decisions through them
telling you:

  • Which Web pages are most popular and which are least used.
  • Who is visiting your Web site.
  • Which Web browsers to optimize your Web pages for.
  • Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful.
  • Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages.

Web traffic analysis allows you to determine what marketing
strategies are successful, then to change them accordingly, to
boost your web traffic and sales.