AwStats Install for Multi Domains

Hello,

I found a tutorial that I think I can follow here: http://blog.dreamhosters.com/forum/3rdparty/56463-Easy-AWStats-Installation-Tutorial.htm

but before I go ahead I have a couple of important questions:

1./ How can I install this for all of my domains on DH? I have several hundred

2./ I don't have a cgi-bin folder, should I just create one?

i set up mine on two domains, problem is even tho i ahve entries in the cron file to update both, it only ever updates one. i can run the jobs myself and it works but it won't do it automatically. second, the stats for my second domain always includes some information for my other domain, and i can't figure out why or how.

there are some official articles in DH wiki http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/AWStats_Installation#AWStats_For_Another_Domain

Do you know that DH provides website statistics?

yeah i had a look at those articles before but I'm not familiar with that sort of coding and i dont have the time to start learning right now.

The stats they have are really awefull & I can't work anything out with those stats.

Well that's too bad and my renewal comes up soon so I guess I will have to start looking around for another host that offers awstats without all these problems.

Before you go, what decisions do you make based on the statistics?

everything, I can't work out any of the data, nothing makes sense to me... Maybe I will take another look later but I love AwStats as I can see all the important info like daily visitors, spider visits, search words, where the search's come from and lots more... when i looked at the current DH's stats it was just one big huge mess & it looked ugly and messy.

In reply to:

---

as I can see all the important info like daily visitors, spider visits, search words, where the search's come from and lots more...

---

Right, but what do you do with that, other than say, hmm, that's interesting?

In reply to:

---

just one big huge mess & it looked ugly and messy.

---

Sounds like my website.

To get the data set up the way you want, you would have to manually go through and set things up for each domain. It really isn't that tedious and once you start doing it it would really only take you 5 minutes per domain. Most web hosts don't even have all of the powerful options for AWStats set up so even if you moved hosts I would still recommend setting up your own.

As for the cgi-bin folder, every directory on the DreamHost platform is cgi ready, so you wouldn't have to use the cgi-bin directory but that's how I was used to doing it, so that's how I wrote it in the tutorial. So to answer your question, yes you just create that directory and it will work fine for you.

With several hundred domains, you are probably either hosting for clients you've designed sites for or you have many sites that aren't doing too much. Just pick the most important ones and start with them. If they are for clients, then charge them for the set up if they want to have more expansive stats available.

Custom AWStats Installed, Password Protected and Configured for Hourly Auto Update - $20 (PM with inquiries)

tacimala, ok thanks for getting back to me & the tips... I will take another look at this over the next few days and see if I can get this setup.


ardo wrote: "Right, but what do you do with that, other than say, hmm, that's interesting?"

heaps, much more than just thinking it's interesting, it would take too long to write here but basically find out where & why & how my visitors arive at my site so I can improve the seo.

If you are using the stats for SEO purposes, you may want to look into something more substantial. Google Analytics is probably the best free one for that. It makes nice graphs for conversion rates and so on. You have a lot more power with that and it is much easier to see when a campaign is working. Something like Web Position Gold is good too for creating ranking reports.

Custom AWStats Installed, Password Protected and Configured for Hourly Auto Update - $20 (PM with inquiries)

I would never use Google Analytics as many sites I go to that use it take forever to load, it is very bulky, around 60kb to load plus it depends on how clogged up their server is at the time. I would also never use any seo software especially WPG as that is well known to be a cause of many sites been sandboxed by Google.

Also Google are taking all our info and using it for their own interest's, there is lots of discussion about their evil intentions about this on the web right now... watch out & DO NOT TRUST GOOGLE

Anyway I'm about to setup AW stats, that is all I need and if it works like it does on my windows sites then that will be great.

Edited by pforums on 02/06/07 07:47 PM (server time).

You wrote: "With several hundred domains, you are probably either hosting for clients you've designed sites for or you have many sites that aren't doing too much. Just pick the most important ones and start with them. If they are for clients, then charge them for the set up if they want to have more expansive stats available."

I only host my own sites , I don't have any clients anymore,left that business and now just run my own websites (thanks heavens)

tacimala, I also need to know with installing it for multi domains, do I install the awstats & cgi folder in the top level (where they are at the moment) or do I need to install these folders & files in each domains directory?

well I have been thinking about what you said about "Google Analytics" and maybe you are right, I could use this and these sites I have here are not that important anyway & i just want to mainly keep track of seo & how well the sites are been indexed & found etc at this stage. .. I still don't trust google though but maybe I just have to get past that in this instance...

In reply to:

---

I still don't trust google though but maybe I just have to get past that in this instance...

---

If you don't want to use Google Analytics, a possible alternative is TraceWatch. I use it on a number of my domains and find the real-time stats valuable.

You will need to add a line of PHP to any pages that you want 'counted', but I believe this is similar to Google Analytics.

Another thing, TraceWatch doesn't like running under the default DreamHost install of PHP5, due to register_long_arrays being set to off.

Mark

The awstats and cgi-bin directories need to be in your domain.com directory (web accessible) on your server. If you put it outside of that directory then you can not access those files via the web and it would be pointless.

As for using SEO programs and having that be the cause of being "sandboxed" that is simply not the case. However, too many queries from a single IP or IP range will raise a red flag and you can get that IP banned from usage. These programs are run locally though and not server side. Any normal user would not go past these default guidelines and you would have to do some serious scraping for that to happen.

Custom AWStats Installed, Password Protected and Configured for Hourly Auto Update - $20 (PM with inquiries)

ok I will look into that...

"If you don't want to use Google Analytics, a possible alternative is TraceWatch. "

ok thanks for confirming that I need to install this for each domain.

"The awstats and cgi-bin directories need to be in your domain.com directory"

I understand what your saying.

"As for using SEO programs and having that be the cause of being "sandboxed" that is simply not the case. "