Overview
Analog is an open-source website statistics analysis program and is installed on all DreamHost servers by default, however you must manually enable it in your panel in order to use it.
You can enable stats on the Site Statistics page by creating a stats user.
Site statistics are not available on DreamPress plans.
Per GDPR, DreamHost stores HTTP logs by default for 7 days.
Enabling stats
Visit the following article for full details on how to enable and view stats:
Some web applications (content management systems, blog software, and so on) may implement Apache url rewrite rules that can prevent you from reaching this page unless you modify those rules. General instructions for making such modifications (and specific instructions for certain commonly encountered web applications such as WordPress), can be found in the making stats accessible with htaccess article.
Summary of statistics functions
After you log in, the first section shows the site stats.
From the Go To section at the top of the page, users are able to navigate to separate sections and summaries. The remaining area of General Summary section is as follows:
- Successful requests
- The number of times someone succeeded in accessing any file at your site.
- Average successful requests per day
- The average number of requests if traffic remained consistent.
- Successful requests for pages
- The number of times someone succeeded in accessing a "page" file at your site (files ending in .html, .htm, .php, .cgi, and so on).
- Average successful requests for pages per day
- The average number if site visits were consistent.
- Failed requests
- The number of times someone attempted to access a file from your site, but for whatever reason was unsuccessful.
- Redirected requests
- The number of times a visitor attempted to access a particular file, but was redirected to a different one by the server. There are two main reasons why this happens:
- The visitor has incorrectly requested a directory name without the following slash. For example, a request for www.example.com/yourdirectory (the incorrect name) returns www.example.com/yourdirectory/ (the correct name).
- "Click-thru" banner ads can also cause a request to be redirected.
- Distinct files requested
- How many files (pages, pictures, programs, and so on) were requested from your site.
- Distinct hosts served
- Basically, how many different people visited your site. The number can be slightly deceiving though, as customers of some large ISPs go through a proxy server. As a result, a large number of visitors may be represented as a small number of distinct hosts.
- Data transferred
- The total amount of data transferred.
- Average data transferred per day
- What the average amount of data transferred would be with consistent traffic.
Time-based reports
The report types can be split up by weekly, daily, and hourly summaries.
Here is a description of the four sections:
- Weekly Report
- A summary of the past several weeks by the weekly start date. It also lists busiest week at the bottom.
- Daily Report
- Similar to the Weekly Report but this breaks down the busiest site by day.
- Daily Summary
- Overall summary of a single day’s stats.
- Hourly Summary
- Breaks down requests and pages by the hour for the past day.
Visitor-based reports
Due to the size of the stats page, the visitor-based reports section is broken up slightly to review the various sections individually.
- Organization Report
- Lists the organizations, institutions, and ISPs under which the computers that accessed information were registered.
- Host Reports
- Shows all the individual computers that accessed information on your website.
- User Reports
- Listing of all users who have visited your site over the specified time period. If your site requires users to authenticate themselves (by logging in), their username will appear. Otherwise, the user's cookie is displayed.
- Browser Report/Summary
- Browser Report/Summary breaks down site requests and successful page visits by different browsers.
- Operating System Report
- A list of operating systems used by people visiting your site (e.g., Windows, Linux, Apple, and so on). These are sorted by number of requests.
- Status Code Report
- Lists each HTTP Status Code your site records.
- File Type Report
- The number of times each file type (e.g., image, page, and so on) was requested from your site.
- Directory Report
- Lists where directories files were downloaded.
- Failure Report
- Lists filenames which caused an error.
- Request Report
- Lists all the files/pages that were downloaded from your website over the specified time period.