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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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  • umm.... deploy analytics?
    – Scott C Wilson
    May 17, 2012 at 11:42
  • 1
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_log
    – Daniel Beck
    May 17, 2012 at 11:48
  • Thanks for suggestions. I will try to get logs... Deploying analytics is tricky - I don't want to play with others people websites...
    – Michal Stefanow
    May 17, 2012 at 12:57
  • Hosting questions are actually off topic here, @Paul, so adding more information probably won't help immediately. Michal, We have a site for Webmasters – I'm inclined to say your topic would better fit there if you have any additional questions.
    – slhck
    May 17, 2012 at 13:09
  • Yes, you can get all infromation from your server logs, and that is tedious work.
    – Deepak Mathur
    Dec 25, 2020 at 21:34

2 Answers 2

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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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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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