The bog standard logs and the webpages it gets displayed on with 1and1 hosting is pretty crap. Especially when we have up to 1500 domains in one package which all get bundled into the same set of stats. Most of these are just holding pages and I?m not interetsed in them but they do screw up the logs enough.
Couple this with the fact that the domains I am interested in are generally php and mysql driven beasts which don?t actually get included in the access logs. This is because they use the Apache ErrorDocument 404 trick to turn nasty variable ridden urls into nice user-friendly ones, and as such get treated as errors by apache and not logged. Any user agent get told they’re ok by the php script but this doesn?t help with logging.
So I decided to install Awstats which I have used on a single site on my own server and think is quite excellent. I decided to get it up and running before I tried it with the error logs as well. This in itself can be a bit of a pain on 1and1 servers but Ravi?s awstats and 1and1.com tutorial is a good place to start. It?s still not working properly but I?m gonna wait till next week till I have another crack.
I?ll post more when I either get it figured out or give up…