Statistics overview

All DreamHost accounts have the ability to add site statistics to any fully hosted website. The stat service tracks the following information:

• total number of requests
• traffic by domain
• traffic by file
• requests by browser type
• requests by operating system
• requests by referring URLs
• and more!

Before your site can begin logging statistics, you must first create a stats user. Visit the following article for further details:

• Accessing Stats

To view your statistics report:

1. Visit your domain name followed by /stats. For example, if your site is titled example.com, visit example.com/stats which opens up a login prompt.
2. Enter a username and password when prompted. The credentials are the username and password you created for the stats user.

If you’re using a CMS such as WordPress, you may need to add additional code to your site's .htaccess file in order to access the /stats login page.

View the making stats accessible with htaccess article for further information.

Visit the following article for further details on what exactly is tracked and what reports are available:

• Analog

Most of the results you see in your reports are broken down by date, #reqs, and #pages:

#reqs

Represents the number of files that are requested during a page request. When a single page is requested, all content on that page is also requested. If a page has 25 images, a single page visit triggers 26 requests: 25 requests for the images and 1 request for the page.

#pages

Represents the entire page request, not the individual files within it. In the #reqs example above, the #pages value is 1 since only that single page is requested. If your stats show 10 visitors and 40 page views, this means each visitor viewed 4 pages on average. More page views per visitor means people are staying on your site longer and viewing more content.

View the following article for a further explanation about statistics results:

• Analog 6.0: What the results mean

1. Navigate to the Site Statistics page.
2. To the right of your site, click the Configure button under the Actions column.

   Three analog report types appear (Month, Day, and Longterm).

3. Click the Edit button to the right of one of the reports.

   A checklist appears, which allows you to customize the report settings.

4. Check the boxes of the report you wish to enable.
5. If a report includes a 'Show' or 'Show All' option, enter a value or check the box.
6. Scroll down to the bottom and click the Save Changes button.

1. Navigate to the Site Statistics page.
2. To the right of your domain, click the Configure Stats Report button.

   Three report types appear.

3. To the right of a specific report under the Actions column, click the Edit button.

   An options page opens for that specific report.

4. Check the box next to ‘Enable DNS lookups for numeric IP addresses’.

You should start seeing domain names instead of IP addresses the next time the stats runs for your domain.

If you need to review the raw log files for your stats rather than a statistics report, you can view them by logging into your web server. In your user's home directory, there is a folder named /logs.

View the error log article for instructions on how to access this folder.

You can then find your stat logs in the following directories. Make sure to change username to your Shell user.

/home/username/logs/example.com/http/analog/
/home/username/logs/example.com/http/hits
/home/username/logs/example.com/http/html

Stats are generated once a day early in the morning, which analyzes logs from the previous day. Stats for a given day should be available by noon of the next day, Pacific Time.