Your hosting account already includes a visitor statistics tool called Awstats, and you don't need to install any software or add a script to your website to use it. It reads your server's raw access logs and turns them into a readable report showing who visited your site, how much bandwidth they used, and where they came from.
What Awstats Shows You
- Unique visitors and total page views, broken down by day, week, and month
- Bandwidth used to serve your website's pages, images, and files
- Top referring websites, so you can see where your traffic is coming from
- Search keywords visitors used to find your site (when available)
- Visitor countries, browsers, and operating systems
- HTTP error counts (404s, 500s, and so on) by page
This is a good first stop if you just want a quick overview of traffic without setting up a separate analytics account.
Viewing Your Statistics
In cPanel
- Log in to your cPanel account.
- Scroll to the Metrics section on the main dashboard.
- Click Awstats.
- If your account hosts more than one domain, choose the domain you want to check from the list.
- Click the domain name or the View icon next to it to open the full report.
In DirectAdmin
- Log in to your DirectAdmin account.
- Go to Statistics / Logs in the left-hand menu.
- Click Show Statistics.
- Select the domain you want to view (if you have more than one).
- Click Awstats from the list of available statistics tools to open the report.
Reading the Report
The report opens with a summary showing total visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth for the current month. Below that, you'll find a monthly history table so you can compare traffic over time, and further sections breaking activity down by day of the month, hour of the day, referring sites, search keywords, visitor countries, and browsers or devices used.
If a particular page is generating a lot of 404 or 500 errors, that shows up in the errors section too, which can help you spot broken links or misconfigured pages.
Awstats data updates once a day, usually overnight, so it won't show visits from the last few hours in real time. If you need live, up-to-the-minute analytics, consider adding a tool like Google Analytics directly to your website in addition to Awstats.
If a page on your site is throwing errors rather than just showing up in your traffic report, see How to View Your Website's Error Logs for a closer look at what's causing them.