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Si4351233

: Counting hits to a website that does not have analytics installed Is there a way to see from my hosting account how many visits a site receives if there is no analytics package? I have a

@Si4351233

Posted in: #GoogleAnalytics

Is there a way to see from my hosting account how many visits a site receives if there is no analytics package?

I have a shared hosting account with cPanel on Apache and gave user rights to a 3rd party. They deployed a website which does not have any analytics installed.

Not sure if I have access to logs, or if there is something like a counter in DNS queries.

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@Si4351233

The correct answer is - surprise surprise - server logs.

In my hosting they are located in ftp://hosting.name/access-logs

See the example:

74.125.189.19 - - [22/May/2012:00:31:13 +0200] "GET /cambridge/Michal-Stefanow.png HTTP/1.1" 200 55699 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible) Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)"
220.181.108.173 - - [22/May/2012:00:36:48 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)"
69.171.234.3 - - [22/May/2012:00:41:51 +0200] "GET /cambridge/Citrix.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 39849 "-" "facebookexternalhit/1.0 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)"
95.108.247.252 - - [22/May/2012:01:18:26 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)"
95.108.247.252 - - [22/May/2012:01:18:29 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 13902 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)"
65.52.109.72 - - [22/May/2012:04:06:04 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"
65.52.109.72 - - [22/May/2012:04:06:40 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"
199.21.99.70 - - [22/May/2012:06:00:41 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 13902 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)"

(right now I see why grep/sed/awk scripting skills are so useful for sys admins)

Of course simple analytics script would do the trick but apparently I had to count visits post factum.

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@Shelley277

Even if you control the DNS, visitors may (indeed, probably will) be using caching DNS servers so a DNS query does not correspond to a page-view.

If you are using apache and have access to the logs, it should be simple enough to count the GET requests for pages in their site, stripping out ones from duplicate IP addresses on a given day. Ideally you'd do this with a script of some kind rather than manually, of course.

I have no idea how to do the same thing with other server software, but it will be possible. Look for where it puts its logs.

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