Usage Statistics

The internet is dominated by Apache and IIS for web hosting. A recent survey undertaken by Serverwatch (www.serverwatch.com), in June 2007, which analyzed 24.7 million websites, indicated that 73.52% of the market is held by Apache web servers and 19.63% held by Microsoft's IIS. Netcraft, a site which also conducts market research on web server usage statistics, supports these findings. In fact, of 127,961,479 sites that responded with data, Apache was found to be the top developer with 50.96% followed by Microsoft with 34.31%.

At the site level, there are numerous statistics packages that can be installed to monitor website usage statistics. These vary depending on the hosting provider. In some cases these packages are offered free of charge, in other cases additional cost may be incurred. Webalizer is the traffic statistics package that is commonly used with the Apache web server. These stats are displayed in a report format that allows the end user to drill down to ascertain further information. Some of the information that is displayed includes: total hits, total files, total pages, total visits, unique URL's, hits per hour, hits per day, files per day, pages per day, entry pages, exit pages and search strings. Essentially, you can use the reports to determine traffic statistics. You can usually access these logs through the administration console provided as part of you hosting account.

Microsoft SQL Report Pack for internet information services provides the functionality for extracting information from Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) log files. You can use the provided templates for the purposes of designing new reports. The reports provided by this include: global statistics, site summary, time period, day of week, hourly statistics, day of month, OS statistics, browser statistics, country statistics, length statistics, pages and visitors. You can download the report pack from the Microsoft site. You can also find additional information on the reporting functionality.

There are other web server usage statistics packages that can be incorporated to monitor traffic statistics and compile statistics reports. AW Stats is an example of a commonly used package that many hosting companies provide. This may be provided free of charge or offered for an additional cost. Google Analytics is also a popular package that is offered to individuals who have registered an account with Google. This service is provided free of charge and is rapidly gaining popularity amongst webmasters because of its powerful functionality and unbeatable price. You can find out more by visiting Google (http://www.google.com/analytics).

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