Access Logs & Stats

All FastVirtual web hosting plans include access to detailed web site statistics, including daily traffic analysis. Raw access and error logs are also provided.

Daily Web Site Statistics

FastVirtual's statistics utility provides a detailed summary of your site traffic. Simply enter a date range, select your preferences, specify criteria to match, and the statistics utility will present a comprehensive report of all your web site activity, including:

• Total daily hits, page views, and unique IP addresses
• Analysis of hit patterns through each 24 hour period
• Details of files accessed (either all files, or as per your criteria)
• Summary of page referrals
• Details of accessing clients
• Summary of accessing web browsers
• Summary of referring search engines
• Details of keywords used on referring search engines
• Summary of countries accessing your site
• Detailed error information

To access the statistics utility, visit the "Hosting" area of your account control panel and select "View my site statistics".

Raw Error and Access Logs

FastVirtual also provides customers with raw error and access logs. Log files are compatible with third-party analysis software, and can be downloaded using Webby or FTP.

Log files are retained for seven days, and are stored in the "logs" directory, one level above your document root ("htdocs"). This directory contains both error and access logs. Error log files are named "error.log", and access log files are named "accessYYYYMMDD.log.gz", where YYYYMMDD is the year, month and day of the log.

Access log files can be uncompressed using WinZip or other file compression utility. Error log files are not compressed.

Database Logs

Web hosting plans that include MySQL database support also have access to database query logs. Both successful queries, and slow or non-indexed queries are logged.

Database log files are retained for seven days, and are stored in the "logs" directory, as per error and access logs. Successful query log files are named "queryYYYYMMDD.log.gz". Slow query log files are named "slow-queryYYYYMMDD.log.gz".

Cron Output Logs

Output from scheduled cron tasks is also logged. Cron logs are retained for seven days, and are stored in the "logs" directory, as per error and access logs. Cron log files are named "cronYYYYMMDD.log".

Statistics Availability

Statistics data for the preceding day is usually available through the statistics utility and log files by 4 a.m. (Pacific time).

Time Stamping

All logs and timestamps are marked in Pacific Time (GMT -8.00). If you are located in a different time zone, you can enter a time offset into the statistics utility. All statistics will then be shown in your local time.

Hits and Page Hits

• Page hits count actual web pages (i.e. .htm, .html or .shtml files).
• Hits count all files, including web pages, images, multimedia, etc.

Referrals

A referral is the URL of the page the visitor was viewing before accessing your site. These are usually search engines, or other sites that link you yours. The statistics utility excludes referrals from your own site by default.

Pattern Matching

The statistics utility can perform complex pattern matching tasks using regular expressions. If you have not used regular expressions before, this option may seem confusing. Although regular expressions can be very complex, if you follow these simple guidelines, you should be able to easily customize your statistics results to your exact requirements.

In regular expression syntax, "|" means "or" and "&" means "and". Therefore, if you wanted to find all files that contain ".gif" and ".jpg", you would enter this as:

.jpg&.gif

Whereas, if you wanted to find all files that contain ".gif" or ".jpg", you would enter this as:

.jpg|.gif

If you wanted to see how many visitors were viewing mypage.html, myvideo.mov, and myscript.cgi, you would check the "Include files with this pattern" box under "File access information", and enter this as:

mypage.html&myvideo.mov&myscript.cgi

Whereas, if you wanted to see how many visitors were viewing all your HTML pages and video files, you would enter this as:

.html&.mov

Excluding files from your statistics results works in exactly the same manner. For example, if you wanted to exclude all ".css", ".js", ".jpg" and ".gif" files, as well as file that contained "mypage" and "myscript" in their name, irrespective of their file type, you would check the "Exclude files with this pattern" box under "file access information", and enter this as:

.css&.js&.jpg&.gif&mypage&myscript