I was looking at different solutions for web statistics for web hosting companies and most are disapointing. Those that are affordable look terrible and most don't have very detailed reports. Then there is Urchin and Web Trends but who has the $$$ for that.

I however did find one that looked nice and had all the reports I could think of and came in under $500 for 500 users. LiveStats from http://www.mediahouse.com

Their online demo rocks but has anyone here used them on your server? Any know bugs or security issues? I am just afraid the package is to good to be true.

Let me know.

MediaHouse LiveStats is an absolutely brilliant product I believe innerhost.com,hostingsolutions.net and few others use it, it's the best I've used; easily better than WebTrends. It works on NT only though.

Damn It! I knew there had to be a catch.

Eh ;) It looks great, as much of the rest windows-oriented software, but that's just of no use... =/

Jeremy, you know we use Urchin on our UNIX plans, but on our NT plans we use LiveStats.

Originally posted by jayglate
Jeremy, you know we use Urchin on our UNIX plans, but on our NT plans we use LiveStats.

LOL. Figures :)
Now if someone could just come out with a package at the same price & feature level for linux we could all be happy.

By the way. I can't remember but what stats proggy does alabanza use?

Jeremy,

MediaHouse is an excellent software. We've been using it for about 3 years now for our stats and have never been disappointed.

And as I understand it, they are currently developing a version that will run on Linux - I seem to remember seeing some posts over at FutureQuest's customer support UBB that indicated they were waiting for the LiveStats Linux version as well. I have no idea when it'll be ready, but I know it's been in development for quite some time.

The other thing you should know is that you do not have to run LiveStats on the same physical machine as you run the web sites from - so even if you are running entirely Linux servers, you could set up one NT server running LiveStats. The program is set up so that it'll pull the logfiles off of your web server boxes and process them on it's own dedicated server. In fact, even though we run NT on our web servers anyway, we still run LiveStats on it's own boxes to take that load off of our web servers.

So there are a lot of options you can use to implement LiveStats, depending on how long you wish to wait and whether you have the budget to put an NT box onto your network.

At any rate, it's a wonderful program and a truly amazing price. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Good luck,

Jason

That doesn't sound too bad. Does the script have to be run as root or can it be run on a large virtual account or semi dedicated box.

Also I see the live stats. How would that work if the stats were on a different box? Or would they?

When you speak of load. Is there alot there? How much?


I emailed the company and they said they are doing a study to see how feasable it would be to port to linux but they mentioned nothing of coding it yet.


Thanks for the response.
Jeremy



Originally posted by Jason Ellis
Jeremy,

MediaHouse is an excellent software. We've been using it for about 3 years now for our stats and have never been disappointed.

And as I understand it, they are currently developing a version that will run on Linux - I seem to remember seeing some posts over at FutureQuest's customer support UBB that indicated they were waiting for the LiveStats Linux version as well. I have no idea when it'll be ready, but I know it's been in development for quite some time.

The other thing you should know is that you do not have to run LiveStats on the same physical machine as you run the web sites from - so even if you are running entirely Linux servers, you could set up one NT server running LiveStats. The program is set up so that it'll pull the logfiles off of your web server boxes and process them on it's own dedicated server. In fact, even though we run NT on our web servers anyway, we still run LiveStats on it's own boxes to take that load off of our web servers.

So there are a lot of options you can use to implement LiveStats, depending on how long you wish to wait and whether you have the budget to put an NT box onto your network.

At any rate, it's a wonderful program and a truly amazing price. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Good luck,

Jason

Originally posted by JeremyL
By the way. I can't remember but what stats proggy does alabanza use?

httpanalyze

from netstore.de

Originally posted by JeremyL
That doesn't sound too bad. Does the script have to be run as root or can it be run on a large virtual account or semi dedicated box.

Honestly, I am not sure. You'd have to ask them (I'm just the owner, not a SysAdmin - I have a tech guy who handles running the software). My assumption is that it has to be installed as any software (so you'd have to have root access) but I'm not certain of that.

Also I see the live stats. How would that work if the stats were on a different box? Or would they?.

Yes, even when running on a separate box the stats are live.

When you speak of load. Is there alot there? How much?

Well, the stats does add a bit of load to a server, especially during the time it is processing log files initially (i.e. if you add stats to a domain that already exists on the server, the stats server must process all the historical logfiles all at once) and also a bit of load if a bunch of people are accessing their stats all at once. That's why we run it on separate servers.

However, that being said, the load is a fraction of what WebTrends needs to run, and is really not that severe. For reference, we are running the MediaHouse servers on older Pentium Pro 200 boxes. They do have 256 MB of RAM, but the processor is ancient. We're running statistics for about 125 domains on each box, and they handle it just fine. But of course these boxes are doing nothing but statistics, so I couldn't really say what impact the stats have if you were running them on the same machines you're using for serving web sites.

Jason

LiveStats is ultra-sweet stuff - I have been looking at it for quite some time now, and price as well as performance looks absolutely fantastic - except for the NT-stuff :(

I hope they'll get out a Linux LiveStats out soon ... but for now I think I'll have to go with Wusage which looks rather powerful as well!

Have a great day,

Mike

Jason,

I talked to them and they said there were two ways to do the Linux/Windows thing. One with Samba and the other with transfering the logs with crons. Which do you use?

Originally posted by JeremyL
I talked to them and they said there were two ways to do the Linux/Windows thing. One with Samba and the other with transfering the logs with crons. Which do you use?

Well, as I noted above we don't currently run any Linux servers, so I don't have a recommendation on which method is better. And since I don't really know much about Linux to begin with, I couldn't really even say which technology works better in general.

So that one is entirely up to you. You might want to try it both ways and see which works more effectively.

Good luck,

Jason

I would think Samba would be your best bet as far as performance.

Samba, or just NFS... But give close attention to scurity, if you decide to use it.
As for amount of load - ha, this is not a ray-tracing...