We currently work with Webalizer but I'm hoping for some other opinions and options. Our hosting business is getting more and more successful and out clients are looking for more features in their stats to stay competitive with other hosting companies.

Here are some of the things I'm looking for in stats programs:

1. Accurate stats for total unique visitors and page views. Viewable by different time periods, ie by day, by month.

2. URL referrer stats. Viewable by different time periods and for different numbers. Ie top 25 referring URLs for the day, or top 100 referring URLs for the month.

3. Domain referrer stats. Viewable by different time periods and for different numbers. Ie top 25 referring domains for the day, or top 100 referring domains for the month.

4. Accurate stats for total bandwidth used. Viewable by different time periods, ie by day, by month.

5. Forecasts for uniques and bandwidth etc
Stats for particular pages in addition to stats for the whole domain.

6. Visitor stats, ie type of browser, country, screen size etc
Stats reports load reasonably fast and have a good user interface.

7. Overview of a time period so we can see trends in traffic, ie a graph of the number of uniques a day over the past year.

Any input is appreciated.

Thanks
Jason

One other important note, we run RedHat 7.2 on all of our servers.

I'd recommend Urchin (http://www.quantified.com/) if you have a few $$ to spend. We used to use it, but it was overkill for a small hosting biz. It is extremely fast, because it's written in C rather than perl. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was tested against something like a 2GB log and was completed in 45 minutes. It took webtrends about 12 hours to do the same log!

-Dan

Urchin is the best bang for the buck. It's not free, but it isn't that expensive either. I think it's $495 per 25 domains <LIST>. I love it, and wouldn't use anything else.

Hmmm.... tried to look at the demo for Urchin and all I can get is

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /report/english/index.cgi on this server.

Apache/1.3.22 Server at demo.urchin.com Port 80

I hope they catch the 403 errors in their stats and fix it :D

If you've got the $$$, go for Urchin. If you're looking for a free solution, I'd highly recommend AWStats (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/). Both have demos available on their websites -- AWStats is pretty impressive for a free product.

I really want to like awstats, but I just can't do it. It chews through system resources so bad on large sites, and is far too slow. I run it every hour on a site that does about 11GB of traffic per day, and it still takes about 5 minutes per run. It takes webalizer less than a minute to do the full log once a day. This is with DNS lookups OFF! If they can get the cpu usage down, and speed it up, it will be great. But unfortunately they seem to be focusing on making it pretty instead.

-Dan

Analog for the actual log processing and ReportMagic to generate some nice output is a solution I really like. Free, fast and also nice looking results.

I had some trouble getting ReportMagic to work on our RAQ:s but for Windows boxes it's so easy.

I know what your saying but urchin needs IIS and windows to run- We run a ecommerce web design business and our customers use webtrends because it is easy to install and very straightforward to use. Most people just set it up and let it run thru the night and in morning it is ready.


but if you know what you are doing urchin is faster

Ummm....
Urchin runs under just about every major platform.

-Dan

LiveStats 6.0 should do it. Check it out at http://www.deepmetrix.com/livestats/index.html

Hope that helps!