Unique Visitor:
A unique
visitor is a person or computer (host) that has made at least 1 hit
on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the
report.
If this user makes several visits during this period, it is counted
only once. Visitors are tracked by IP address, so if multiple users are
accessing your site from the same IP (such as a home or office
network), they will be counted as a single unique visitor.
The period shown by AWStats reports is by default the current month.
However if you use AWStats as a CGI you can click on the "year" link to
have a report for all the year.
In such a report, period is a full year, so Unique Visitors are number
of hosts that have made at least 1 hit
on 1 page of your web site during the year. Visits:
Number of visits made by all visitors.
Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page, and then
requests three other pages within an hour. All of the "pages" are
included in the visit, therefore you should expect
multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor
(assuming that some of the unique IPs are
logged with more than an hour between requests) Pages:
The number of "pages" viewed by visitors. Pages are usually HTML, PHP
or ASP files, not images or other files requested as a result
of loading a "Page" (like js,css... files). Files listed in the
NotPageList config
parameter (and match an entry of OnlyFiles config parameter if used)
are not counted as "Pages".
Hits:
Any files requested from the server (including files that are "Pages")
except those that match
the SkipFiles config parameter. Bandwidth:
Total number of bytes for pages, images and files downloaded by web
browsing.
Note 1: Of course, this number includes only traffic for web only (or
mail only, or ftp only
depending on value of LogType).
Note 2: This number does not include technical header data size used
inside the HTTP or HTTPS protocol or by
protocols at a lower level (TCP, IP...).
Because of two previous notes, this number is often lower than bandwith
reported by your provider (your
provider counts in most cases bandwitdh at a lower level and includes
all IP and UDP traffic). Entry Page:
First page viewed by a visitor during its visit.
Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next
month,
you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages.
That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages. Exit Page:
Last page viewed by a visitor during its visit.
Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next
month,
you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages.
That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages. Session Duration:
The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit.
Some Visits durations are 'unknown' because they can't always be
calculated. This is the major reason for this:
- Visit was not finished when 'update' occured.
- Visit started the last hour (after 23:00) of the last day of a month
(A technical reason prevents AWStats from
calculating duration of such sessions). Grabber:
A browser that is used primarily for copying locally an entire site.
These include
for example "teleport", "webcapture", "webcopier"... Direct access / Bookmark:
This number represent the number of hits or ratio of hits when a visit
to your site comes
from a direct access. This means the first page of your web site was
called:
- By typing your URL on the web browser address bar
- By clicking on your URL stored by a visitor inside its favorites
- By clicking on your URL found everywhere but not another internet web
pages (a link in a document,
an application, etc...)
- Clicking an URL of your site inside a mail is often counted here. Add To Favourites:
This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated
indicator
that can be used to have an idea of the number of times a visitor has
added your web
site into its favourite bookmarks.
The technical rules for that is the following formula: Number of Add to Favourites = round((x+y) / r)
where
x = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/anydir/favicon.ico", with
a referer field not defined, and with no 404 error code
y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico", with a
referer field not defined, with or without 404 error code
r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all
browsers (r <= 1)
As you can see in formula, only IE is used to count reliable "add", the
"Add to favourites"
for other browsers are estimated using ratio of other browsers usage
compared to ratio of
IE usage. The reason is that only IE do a hit on favicon.ico nearly
ONLY when a user add the
page to its favourites. The other browsers make often hits on this file
also for other reasons
so we can't count one "hit" as one "add" since it might be a hit for
another reason.
AWStats differentiate also hits with error and not to avoid counting
multiple hits
made recursively in upper path when favicon.ico file is not found in
deeper directory
of path.
Note that this number is just an indicator that is in most case higher
than true value.
The reason is that even IE browser sometimes make hit on favicon
without an "Add to favourites"
action by a user.
HTTP Status Codes:
HTTP status codes are returned by web servers to indicate the status of
a request.
Codes 200 and 304 are used to
tell the browser the page can be viewed.
206 codes indicate partial
downloading of content and is reported in the Downloads section. All
other codes generates hits and traffic 'not seen' by the visitor.
For example a return
code 301 or 302 will tell the browser to ask another page. The browser
will do another hit
and should finaly receive the page with a return code 200
and 304.
All codes that are 'unseen' traffic are isolated by AWStats in the HTTP
Status report chart,
enabled by the directives ShowHTTPErrorsStats.
in config file. You can also change value for 'not error' hits (set by
default to 200 and 304
with the ValidHTTPcodes
directive.
The following table outlines all status codes defined for the HTTP/1.1
draft specification
outlined in IETF
rfc 2068.
They are 3-digit codes where the first digit of this code identifies
the class of the status
code and the remaining 2 digits correspond to the specific condition
within the response class.
They are classified in 5 categories:
1xx
class - Informational
Informational
status codes are provisional
responses from the web server... they give the client a heads-up on
what
the server is doing. Informational codes do not indicate an error
condition.
100
100 Continue
The
continue status code tells the
browser to continue sending a request to the server.
101
101 Switching
Protocols
The
server sends this response when
the client asks to switch from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1
2xx class - Successful
This
class of status code indicates
that the client's request was received, understood, and
successful.
200
200 Successful
201
201 Created
202
202 Accepted
203
203
Non-Authorative Information
204
204 No Content
205
205 Reset Content
206
206 Partial Content
The
partial content success code is
issued when the server fulfills a partial GET request. This happens
when
the client is downloading a multi-part document or part of a larger
file.
3xx
class - Redirection
This
code tells the client that the
browser should be redirected to another URL in order to complete the
request.
This is not an error condition.
300
300 Multiple
Choices
301
301 Moved
Permanently
302
302 Moved
Temporarily
303
303 See Other
304
304 Not Modified
305
305 Use Proxy
4xx
class - Client Error
This
status code indicates that the
client has sent bad data or a malformed request to the server. Client
errors
are generally issued by the webserver when a client tries to gain
access
to a protected area using a bad username and password.
400
400 Bad Request
401
401 Unauthorized
402
402 Payment
Required
403
403 Forbidden
404
404 Not Found
405
400 Method Not
Allowed
406
400 Not Acceptable
407
400 Proxy
Authentication Required
408
400 Request Timeout
409
409 Conflict
410
410 Gone
411
411 Length Required
412
412 Precondition
Failed
413
413 Request Entity
Too Long
414
414 Request-URI
Too Long
415
415 Unsupported
Media Type
5xx
class - Server Error
This
status code indicates that the
client's request couldn't be succesfully processed due to some internal
error in the web server. These error codes may indicate something is
seriously
wrong with the web server.
500
500 Internal
Server Error
An
internal server error has caused
the server to abort your request. This is an error condition that may
also
indicate a misconfiguration with the web server. However, the most
common
reason for 500 server errors is when you try to execute a script that
has
syntax errors.
501
501 Not Implemented
This
code is generated by a webserver
when the client requests a service that is not implemented on the
server.
Typically, not implemented codes are returned when a client attempts to
POST data to a non-CGI (ie, the form action tag refers to a
non-executable
file).
502
502 Bad Gateway
The
server, when acting as a proxy,
issues this response when it receives a bad response from an upstream
or
support server.
503
503 Service
Unavailable
The
web server is too busy processing
current requests to listen to a new client. This error represents a
serious
problem with the webserver (normally solved with a reboot).
504
504 Gateway Timeout
Gateway
timeouts are normally issued
by proxy servers when an upstream or support server doesn't respond to
a request in a timely fashion.
505
505 HTTP Version
Not Supported
The
server issues this status code
when a client tries to talk using an HTTP protocol that the server
doesn't
support or is configured to ignore.
2xx/3xx class - Success
They
are SMTP protocols successfull answers
200
200 Non standard
success response
Non
standard success response
211
211 System status,
or system help reply
System
status, or system help reply
214
214 Help message
Help
message
220
220
Service ready
Service ready
221
221
Service closing transmission channel
Service closing transmission channel
250
250 Requested mail
action taken and completed
Your
ISP mail server have successfully executes a command and the DNS is
reporting a positive delivery.
251
251 User not
local: will forward to
Your
message to a specified
email address is not local to the mail server, but it will accept and
forward the message to a different recipient email address.
252
252 Recipient
cannot be verified
Recipient
cannot be verified but mail server accepts the message and attempts
delivery
354
354 Start mail
input and end with .
Indicates
mail server is ready
to accept the message or instruct your mail client to send the message
body after the mail server have received the message headers.
4xx class - Temporary Errors
Those
codes are temporary error message. They are used to tell client sender
that
an error occured but he can try to solve it but trying again, so in
most cases, clients that
receive such codes will keep the mail in their queue and will try again
later.
421
421
Service not available, closing transmission channel
This
may be a reply to any command if the service knows it must shut down.
450
450 Requested mail
action not taken: mailbox busy or access denied
Your
ISP mail server indicates
that an email address does not exist or the mailbox is busy. It could
be the network connection went down while sending, or it could also
happen if the remote mail server does not want to accept mail from you
for some reason i.e. (IP address, From address, Recipient, etc.)
451
451 Requested mail
action aborted: error in processing
Your
ISP mail server indicates
that the mailing has been interrupted, usually due to overloading from
too many messages or transient failure is one in which the message sent
is valid, but some temporary event prevents the successful sending of
the message. Sending in the future may be successful.
452
452 Requested mail
action not taken: insufficient system storage
Your
ISP mail server indicates, probable overloading from too many messages
and sending in the future may be successful.
453
453 Too many
messages
Some
mail servers have the
option to reduce the number of concurrent connection and also the
number of messages sent per connection. If you have a lot of messages
queued up it could go over the max number of messages per connection.
To see if this is the case you can try submitting only a few messages
to that domain at a time and then keep increasing the number until you
find the maximum number accepted by the server.
5xx class - Permanent Errors
This
are permanent error codes. Mail transfer is definitly a failure. No
other try will be done.
500
500 Syntax error,
command unrecognized or command line too long
501
501 Syntax error
in parameters or arguments
502
502 Command not
implemented
503
503 Server
encountered bad sequence of commands
504
504 Command
parameter not implemented
521
521
does not accept mail or closing transmission channel
You
must be pop-authenticated before you can use this SMTP server and you
must use your mail address for the Sender/From field.
530
530 Access denied
A
sendmailism ?
550
550 Requested mail
action not taken (Relaying not allowed, Unknown recipient user, ...)
Sending
an email to recipients
outside of your domain are not allowed or your mail server does not
know that you have access to use it for relaying messages and
authentication is required. Or to prevent the sending of SPAM some mail
servers will not allow (relay) send mail to any e-mail using another
company’s network and computer resources.
551
551 User not
local: please try or Invalid Address: Relay
request denied
552
552 Requested mail
action aborted: exceeded storage allocation
ISP
mail server indicates, probable overloading from too many messages.
553
553 Requested mail
action not taken: mailbox name not allowed
Some
mail servers have the
option to reduce the number of concurrent connection and also the
number of messages sent per connection. If you have a lot of messages
queued up (being sent) for a domain, it could go over the maximum
number of messages per connection and/or some change to the message
and/or destination must be made for successful delivery.
554
554 Requested mail
action rejected: access denied
557
557 Too many
duplicate messages
Resource
temporarily unavailable Indicates (probable) that there is some kind of
anti-spam system on the mail server.
