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Below is an outline of the Webalizer Statistics Package and a description of what the information means to you.

When you go to view your stats, you will see a general breakdown of the past year's data. It is not meant to be overly specific but rather to give a general idea of the trend your site is following.

The individual month reports include data and graphs illustrating hits, files and visits by hour and by day; additionally, information such as referrers, entry and exit pages, and search strings are available.

To understand what Webalizer is reporting in-depth, read on below.

Concepts & Terminology:

Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page or document being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips).

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the web site during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..). Note in the context of Hits on an individual page or URL that subsequent requests for linked images, etc., are not counted.

Files represent the total number of requests that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browser's cache.

Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the web site. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many IP addresses so it should be used simply as a rough gauge as to the number of visitors to your web site.

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your web site for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non-page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

A KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transferred between the web site and the remote machine.

Common Definitions:

A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to your web site, and is based on the remote machine's IP Address/Hostname.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator. All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on your web site, that is accessible to the remote user, or results in an error (ie: 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc...).

Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your web site. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page.

Search Strings are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various search engines.

Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was, is counted as an Exit page.

Countries are determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Israel, however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are .COM (US Commercial), .NET (Network), .ORG (Non-profit Organization) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an IP address.

HTTP Response Codes:

Response Codes are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol. These 3-digit codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it. The following are generalisations of each group of codes, and are by no means the sum and total of all response codes.
 

Code 2xx = OK
The request was successfully received and processed.
Code 200 means unconditional success.
Code 206 indicates the request was cancelled before it could be fulfilled. Typically the user gave up waiting for data and went to another page.



Code 3xx = Redirection
Further action must be taken in order to complete the request.
Code 301 and 302 occurs when the requested resource has been moved elsewhere, the response indicates where it is at present.
Code 304 means the web server has identified from the request that the client already has a cached copy of the resource which is up-to-date.



Code 4xx = Client Error
The request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled.
Code 401 means that the requested resource requires authentication (ie. a username and password).
Code 403 occurs most often when trying to access a sub-directory which has no index page.
Code 404 occurs when the web server cannot find the requested file or script.



Code 5xx = Server Error
The web server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request.

Information courtesy of mrunix.net and others.
Visit the Webalizer website.