Every "hit" to your web site, including each view of a HTML document, image or other object, is logged in some detail. This information is collected for a number of reasons, including security and billing. Most importantly though, it allows you to guage the usage of your web site and glean interesting information about your site visitors' behaviour, once a large collection of logs are analysied.

The so-called "raw" log file format is essentially one line of text for each hit to your site. This line contains information about the address of the computer requesting the page, the page or object that was sent, the file size, exact date and time of the transfer, the success status of the transfer and so on.

Here is a sample line of a web access log in its raw format:

dialup73.someisp.com.au - - [04/Mar/2005:13:41:06 +1000] "GET /images/mailto.gif HTTP/1.1" 304 - "http://www.goweb.com.au/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"

As you can see, the format appears to be quite complex, and there is obviously a considerable amount of information collected. The one log file line above resulted from viewing a tiny GIF image. For a complex site, you may thus have many thousands of lines of code like this for each day of your site's existence.

So what use is all this? In this raw format, not a whole lot, since the level of detail is too high and it is almost impossible to make any useful generalisations just by scolling through page after page of log entries like this.

However, several advanced log file anaysis programs are available that can covert this raw data into very useful information. This allows you to observe trends and aggregates such as:

• Is my site traffic growing over time, and at what rate?
• What are my most popular pages?
• Which countries are my site visitors viewing from?
• What is the busiest day of the week for my web site?

While we do provide some tools to do this analysis for you, some people may prefer to run their own statistical software directly on the raw log files. For this reason, the log files are made available in your private FTP space for downloading if required.

Where are the raw log files?

The logs reside in a subdirectory of your web space called _log (yes, the underscore character must be present). The current access log is typically called access.log.

Please note that for large or popular sites, we may trim the log file periodically to conserve disk space.

Last updated 07 Apr 2005

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